Rambling about stuff...

An adventure, regardless of what is or where it takes you, is a momentary climax, a splash in the vast pool of life's experiences.  When it is fresh in memory or still underway there is nothing greater than being fully appreciative and riding the wake of the wave as far as it will take you.  But like any disturbance, good or bad, it has to stop somewhere.  Nothing lasts forever.  And when that momentum cedes, as all things eventually do, all you can do is grasp at the remote control in you brain and do one of three things.  For one, you can hit the replay button until the ink has worn off and the rubber is nothing but a nub of its former self and wallow in the glory of you past experiences.  This is a great to have no one ever like you or your stories ever again, I have found.  Or you could throw it all away, pretend that it never happened, and move on to the next thing.  But this is a great way to have yourself forgotten.  The third option, as it is in most cases, is unequivocally the best, albeit the most difficult in execution.

As Andrew Jillings would put it: be here now.  But as I would put it: relentlessly be all the things that make up who you are, but at the same time don't forget where you are and you're doing.  Ya dig?  You can never forget your great adventure and what has happened, but at the same time you have to refuse to let it consume you.  And just as much you have to be able to let it go and slip away sometimes, but never ever forget it completely.  You have to live in the moment, but keep the lessons you have learned in the pocket of your favorite pair of jeans.  To be honest I'm not totally sure where I was going with all of this, but I think what I'm trying to say that the trying part of any adventure is learning to live with yourself once it is all said and done.  The old cliché about how its not the finish line, but how you get there just might not be as true as we all would like to believe.  It IS the finish line and it IS the journey, but even more so it's what you do next.

I guess this is what I was thinking about we were discussing "The Devil's Thumb", specifically when Krakauer was talking about sitting in that bar after climbing down and going back to his menial job building condos.  While I'm assuming that what I wrote before touches upon some truth that is yet unproven; I doubt that he realized this at the time of his adventure.  Krakauer was not trying to inflate himself as some people seemed to suggest in class when he was speaking of his adventures.   He was just expressing what he felt and at the moment it happened to be the GIANT FREAKING MOUNTAIN that he had just climbed.  Even worse, because people did not care for his story in at the bar, I cannot even begin to imagine how intolerable his words would be in the ears of his peers in Colorado.  I can imagine that it was unbelievably frustrating having changed so much, while everything else around remained so exactly the same.