How do you feel?

Everyone asks, how do you feel? It's hard to answer. Someone wrote and said "Are you excited, nervous, anxious, stressed?" I wrote back and said "Yes." As in, all of the above. And then this week I was finally able to put into words how I felt. The Captain asked "How do you feel?"

"You know what, this is how I feel. I feel like we have been climbing a mountain for the last year. At first the view was scenic and the climb enjoyable and then it got a little rocky. But we kept going on. And now we are hanging off the bottom of the cliff, upside down. We can't go back, I guess we could, but there's no real reason to go backwards. We can't go forward without painful crawling to the end and I'm just not sure I have enough energy to crawl to the end. And if we do get to the end and we're now on top of the mountain, I'm not sure what we're going to find. It might be really bad or it might be really good. But since I don't know what it will be, I feel stuck."

So basically, this is how I feel.


Except imagine the blood rushing to my head a little more. So maybe it looks a little more like this.


Wow, now I look like I'm going backwards instead of forwards. But anyways, you get the general idea. I'm not sure that this is the best way to think about this particular part of our journey. It seems kind of limiting. I'm so focused on getting there, that I can't enjoy the process of getting there. And then, what if, when we get there it's really, really bad. I'll just feel stuck...because in my current analogy I'm focused only on one thing. Arrival.

Back when I was a recruiter, my friend JA and I found ourselves with a free weekend in Missoula, Montana. Now if you have never been to Montana before here's what you need to know. It's awesome.

Missoula is home to the University of Montana and like all good universities with any form of hill or mountain nearby, some time in their past history a bunch of students climbed that hill or mountain and created a rock formation with their school letters for all to see. In this case next to the University of Montana there is a 3/4 mile hike to the M through a trail of switchbacks that will take you up about 620 feet in elevation. So on a 1 to 10 scale of hiking difficulty, it's maybe a 4. Well, in my inexpert opinion that is. An expert might call it a 2. Here I am sitting on the M.


At first when JA and I set out that morning we had one goal in mind: get to the M. But after we were done we realized there was an entire mountain behind the M to keep climbing. So after eating our trail mix, a delightful conversation with a girl from Ireland who happened to also be sitting on the M that day and a few gulps of water we set off. (By the way, this girl had never met anyone from Texas before. She was really excited to tell me about a video series she had been watching with a lady whose hair was really large and talked like me. She had been watching Beth Moore.)

We climbed for a while and never quite got to the top before our water ran out and our legs got wobbly. Correction: my legs got wobbly, JA was doing just fine. In fact even if we had made it to the top of the mountain there was another valley behind the mountain that could be walked through to get to another mountain waiting to be climbed.

So here's my point. I need to start thinking differently. I need to stop picturing myself on the side of the cliff and instead picture myself hiking to the M. Hiking to the M had it's moments of difficulty. We got pretty sweaty and I was definitely sore the next day. But for the most part, it was pretty fun. And the M turned out to not be the final destination. There was an entire mountain to be climbed behind the M that was awesome in and of itself.

I'm done with climbing the cliff...I'm going to start hiking to the M instead.

Disclaimer: For those who go to double A and may have heard my husband speak on a similar idea of The Journey last year during senior week you are absolutely correct to assume that his analogy is the one I'm drawing from in this blog post.