Being Where Your Feet Are
· Being
A year after needing a cane, a mountain hike with Sarah reminds Justin to see how far he has come and be present where his feet are.
I do this more than I’d like to admit. We can spend months or years working toward something, and then, almost the moment we arrive, our attention moves to what’s next. The next goal. The next problem. The next version of ourselves we think we should become. Somewhere in all that striving, it becomes surprisingly easy to miss the life we’re actually standing in.
There’s some fascinating research behind this. Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that people’s minds wandered from what they were doing nearly 47 percent of the time, and people tended to report being less happy when their minds wandered. In other words, almost half the time, we may be physically in one place while mentally living somewhere else.
Jon Kabat-Zinn captured the idea beautifully in the title of his book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. I’ve always loved that phrase because it sounds almost ridiculously obvious until you realize how difficult it can be to actually live it.
Which brings me to a mountain, my wife Sarah, a cane, and a lesson I apparently needed to learn again.
There is a story often attributed to the Cherokee Nation that I think about often. Its exact origins aren’t confirmed, and similar versions have appeared in different places over the years, so I don’t want to claim a history we can’t be certain of. But the story itself has endured because there is something deeply human inside it.
An elder tells a child there are two wolves fighting inside each of us. One carries fear, anger, envy, resentment, comparison, and regret. The other carries hope, compassion, gratitude, generosity, love, and peace. When the child asks which wolf wins, the elder gives a simple answer:
“The one you feed.”
A few days ago, halfway up a mountain with Sarah, I realized I had spent nearly two hours feeding the wrong one. And the irony was almost too perfect.
Almost exactly one year earlier, I needed a cane just to get through the same conference.
One Year, Two Very Different Walks
Last year, Sarah and I were in Whistler for a client conference. I love these trips, especially when we get outside the normal work environment and have a chance to experience a beautiful place with people we enjoy. Whistler should have been one of those places I couldn’t wait to explore, but instead I was in a crazy amount of pain and doing everything I could to hide how difficult simply getting around had become.
On the first day of the conference, Sarah finally had enough of watching me struggle and made me go to a pharmacy to buy a cane. I remember looking at it and feeling embarrassed, frustrated, and, if I’m being truthful, a little scared. I didn’t want to need it. I didn’t want people to see me using it. Mostly, I didn’t want to acknowledge what it seemed to say about where I was physically and obviously needing a hip replacement.
Fast-forward almost exactly one year, new hip 10 months old, and Sarah and I were standing at the beginning of a challenging hike in the Canadian Rockies. I wish I could say I immediately recognized the significance of that moment. A year earlier, Sarah was helping me buy a cane so I could get through the conference, and now we were about to climb a mountain together. That alone should have stopped me in my tracks with gratitude.
Instead, I started climbing.
The Voice That Is Never Satisfied
As the trail became steeper, Sarah started getting ahead of me. She is an incredible athlete and hiker, and I was concentrating on every step, thinking about my stride and working hard to walk correctly. I was getting hot, my body was working, and every so often Sarah would stop farther up the trail and wait for me to catch up.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing any of that as remarkable and started seeing it as evidence that I wasn’t doing well enough. I should be faster. Sarah shouldn’t have to wait for me. I should be stronger by now. I still have so much work to do. The farther we climbed, the louder that voice became.
Maybe you know that voice too. It has a remarkable ability to move the finish line just as we’re approaching it. You finally get the opportunity you wanted and start wondering why it isn’t bigger. Your business grows and you focus on the number you haven’t reached. You get healthier and immediately see everything that still needs work. You make it through a difficult season, only to criticize yourself because you aren’t recovering quickly enough.
That voice has never met an accomplishment it couldn’t minimize. If we listen to it long enough, we can become so focused on who we are trying to become that we fail to notice who we have already become.
For nearly two hours, I was surrounded by mountains, glaciers, streams, and one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. I was hiking beside the person I love most, and my body was doing something that would have seemed almost impossible to me a year earlier. Yet instead of experiencing any of it, I had turned the hike into a performance review, and apparently I wasn’t meeting expectations.
I was so focused on how far I still had to go that I had completely forgotten how far I had come.
Old Habits
Eventually, we reached the little teahouse near the top, and for the first time in a couple of hours, I really stopped. I sat there looking at the mountains, the glacier, and the water, with Sarah beside me, and suddenly the absurdity of what I had been doing became impossible to ignore.
A year ago, I needed a cane. Today, my own two legs had carried me up a mountain.
Instead of being grateful for everything my body could do, I had spent most of the climb criticizing it for everything it still couldn’t do. Instead of appreciating that Sarah and I were hiking together again, I had made her waiting for me into evidence that I was somehow behind.
I started laughing. Sarah looked at me and asked, “What’s so funny?” “Old habits,” I said. Then I laughed even harder because I literally just wrote a book about this.
Being HumanKind is built around practices like being hopeful, kind, still, present, and grateful. I call them practices intentionally because they aren’t destinations we arrive at or qualities we master. I even admit in the book that I fail at these “Beings” often, which is exactly why they matter so much to me. They are things I have to keep returning to.
Apparently, writing a book about being present does not guarantee that you’ll actually be present when climbing a mountain.
Sometimes life is kind enough to give you the lesson again.
Same Mountain, Different Hike
When we left the teahouse and started back down, nothing about the trail had changed. The rocks were still there. My legs were still tired. Sarah was still faster than me. But somewhere between sitting down and standing back up, my experience of the mountain had changed because I had finally changed what I was feeding.
I started looking at the glacier instead of constantly evaluating my steps. I listened to the streams and the birds, noticed the smell of the trees, and stopped when something was simply worth looking at. When Sarah got ahead of me, I stopped making it mean something about my progress and instead felt grateful that I was here, on this mountain, doing this with her.
The mountain hadn’t become more beautiful. I had become more available to see it.
I thought again about that research on mind-wandering. My body had been on the mountain all morning, but for much of the climb my mind had been somewhere else. It was living in a future version of me who was stronger, faster, and farther along. Once I came back to where my feet actually were, the experience changed.
This is one of the reasons gratitude and presence are woven so deeply into Being HumanKind. Positive psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory suggests that positive emotions such as gratitude, hope, interest, and joy can broaden our attention and, over time, help us build psychological and social resources. Gratitude doesn’t require us to pretend the hard parts aren’t hard. It simply helps us see that the hard thing isn’t the only thing that is true.
That was exactly what happened on the mountain. My legs were tired, and the glacier was beautiful. I was slower than I wanted to be, and I was doing something remarkable. I still had work ahead of me, and I had already come an incredible distance.
Both things could be true.
Turn Around
When we finally reached the bottom, I turned around and looked back at what we had just done. We had covered over 6 miles miles on a challenging trail, and standing there, the metaphor was almost too obvious to miss.
We spend so much of our lives looking uphill that we rarely turn around. We see what’s next, who’s ahead, what hasn’t happened yet, and what still needs fixing. Ambition can be a wonderful thing, but if uphill is the only direction we ever look, there will always be evidence that we’re behind.