the last honest thing

I’ve climbed mountains. I’ve been in love. I’ve stood at the top of my academic
life and felt myself drowning in that same water.

If I had to recommend one of them, it’s the mountain. For a long time I thought
that was because the mountain was the hardest, and there’s a kind of man who
says things like this because he wants you to know he does hard things. I’d like
to not be that man. The mountain isn’t the hardest. Love is harder. Sitting at a
desk for four years, telling yourself it means something, is harder than any
mountain I have climbed.

The mountain is the only honest one.

Here is what I mean. You can love someone correctly - patiently, without keeping
score, the way it’s supposed to be done - and lose them anyway. You can find guilt
in her eyes for no reason you were given. You can do everything right and be handed
nothing, and there is no appeal, and nobody tells you which part was the mistake.

The same is true of the desk. You can work the way they told you to work and watch
someone who didn’t finish above you, and be expected to smile about it. The exam
doesn’t measure what you know. It measures what it measures. The gap between the
two is where most people I know quietly stopped believing in anything.

The mountain does not do this to you. The mountain has no opinion of you. It cannot
be charmed, and it cannot be cheated, and it does not care that you’re tired, and
this sounds cruel until you have spent a few years being lied to by kinder things.
On a mountain, every step you take is a step you have taken. Nobody can take it
back. Nobody can decide, later, that it didn’t count. You are exactly as high as
you have climbed.

I don’t think I love mountains. I think I love the arithmetic of them. That
effort goes in and altitude comes out, and nothing intervenes, and nothing
betrays. It is the only place I have been where the rules were the rules.

So: climb the mountain. Not because it will make you strong, or brave, or any of
the other things people say. Climb it because you will spend the rest of your life
putting effort into things that do not return it, into people who do not return it,
and you should know, at least once, what it feels like when the world just gives you
what you paid for.

You will come down. You always come down. But you’ll have been up there, and it
will have been real, and no one can amend the record.

That’s not nothing. Some days that’s the only thing I’m sure of.