The impossibility of practice

I went hiking in Japan today, up a really steep mountain, all by myself, in snow, with fear that it was going to rain, with only red and pink plastic ties wrapped around trees to guide me, and signs, in Japanese (only, I don't speak Japanese). I wanted to stop, a lot of times; and I did, a lot of times, and I got super freaked out and in the end I cried.
But this practice, this practice of seeing things as they are, of knowing yourself and your wisdom, of considering the consequences of your actions in the grand scheme of things, actually helped me to do something that I wanted to do (actually make it to the top of the mountain), even when it seemed impossible.
And I was surprised by that, by how it could completely shift my approach to a situation; and I was encouraged by it, by this practice's ability to support us to do difficult things. Climbing up this mountain was scary and hard; but so is forgiving others, or being willing to see someone else's point of view when you really just want them to be wrong so that you can be right and be done with it. Today made me see how powerful, sweet, and enabling this practice can be- how it really can support us to do the things we are truly capable of.

If you want a good story, read on...
 
After that first day of hiking, I was prepared. One of the guests at the hotel had recommended this hike after watching me try to figure out the different trails that were on the poster in the dining hall. He said that the trail was steep but that the views were worth it. I had read something similar in the Lonely Planet guide: that the trip was long, but only because of the steep elevation gain. So, I made sure I had enough water in my camel-back, enough food for a day- long hike, and enough clothing to stay warm in case I encountered snow or inclement weather. The forecast called for a cloudy morning with rain starting around 1PM. I expected the hike up to the cabin to take about four hours (I thought it was a 6000 foot elevation gain) and figured I might hit some rain on my way back down.
It took about 15 minutes to get to the trailhead but once I got there, it was beautiful. I immediately understood what the guy had meant by the views being nice- the trail was through a forest with waterfalls, ferns, and nice wooden logs to help you up the inclines. I laughed at myself, “This trail, is actually steeper than the one you went on yesterday, but you’re loving it. And the reason you’re loving it is because you expected it to be totally steep, and it’s doable. Yesterday, when it was slightly sloping and had snow, you freaked out, because you expected it to be easy.”
“So,” I decided. “The thing to learn from this is, expect it to be hard, and it will be easy.”
“Or….” I interrupted myself. “You could just have no expectations….”
“Darnit you’re right!” I told myself, and kept hiking.
The trail got steeper and steeper and I stopped more often, drank my water, and started to wonder why I was doing this. I was choosing to hike up an even steeper trail than the one I had been on yesterday- the one where I concluded that I didn’t like hiking all day.
“The views,” I thought to myself. “He said the views were amazing. And I want to see the hut; on line it looked like a cool place to hang out. I wouldn’t mind spending the afternoon there, just sipping warm things, maybe even having lunch.” So I pressed on.
The trail continued to be steep, and it kept going up. It didn’t go up, then flatten out for a bit, and go up again, it just kept going up. And you couldn’t really see an end to the up. You just kept going up. I slowed down quite a bit, had to take big steps and put my hands on my knees to kind of boost myself up to the next step. I wondered what it would be like coming down in this in the rain. I checked my watch. I had only been hiking for about an hour. I started to wonder again about why I was doing this. 

“You still have three hours of this- and that’s only the up part. Then you have to come back down, and you might have to do it in the rain.”
But I wasn’t ready to give up yet, so I kept going.
I got to a point in the trail where it leveled off a bit and I was extremely grateful for this. “Yay leveling off!” I cheered to the trail, but I also knew it was only temporary. I had 6000 feet to climb to the hut, there was no way I was done climbing.
The leveling off part was nice but it was also a little sketchy. It was leveling off because it was going around the mountain so the trail was precarious, covered in wooden planks that weren’t securely fastened to the ground beneath them.

“This might be hard to navigate in the rain,” I thought to myself. “Are you sure you should keep going?”
“You know what?” I answered. “You have no idea if it’s going to rain. It might totally not rain at all. Stay present to what’s going on in front of you right now: it’s not raining, you can walk the trail, don’t plan for something that you don’t even know is going to happen, just focus on right now.”
And I did, I kept going.
And then, the trail went up some more. It came to one big mountainside. And I mean mountainside- just the face of a mountain, and it was covered in snow. I looked up and I couldn’t see the top. There were trees on the mountainside, and they had red tape around them to show the path. There was a trail, but by trail I mean a sequence of trees with red tape on them. Other than that it was just a mountainside covered in snow and trees.
I started to go up. I felt grateful for my boots and kicked in to the snow like I had done on the trail the day before. Then I stopped, and looked up. I had taken about 7 or 8 steps and felt like I had made no progress. I pictured myself doing this, taking steps up the mountain, for three more hours, and it seemed like a bad idea.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked myself. “Why are you putting yourself through this physical exertion of hiking up this steep mountain- this is really hard.” But I didn’t feel like turning around- I didn’t feel like I was done yet, I felt like I could keep trying a little more, maybe make it to the next peak. So I kept going.
My progress on the snow was feeble. I wasn’t getting far and it felt like I was just kicking in to the snow and not really going up. I started to get worried. Maybe I should have crampons, maybe this is impossible in just hiking boots, maybe I’m putting myself in danger. The guy at the hostel knew I didn’t have crampons, he knew I was kind of a lightweight, why would he send me up here if it was so dangerous? And then I thought maybe there was new snow from yesterday’s rain and so maybe the trail was dangerous now and I shouldn’t be on it. I took a couple more steps and found that I was falling in to the mountainside with each step. I kept having to catch myself with my bare hands on the snow and I started getting worried about frostbite. I stopped, reached into my backpack, and put on my gloves. “I wonder if this will make things worse, I wonder if wearing the gloves will keep my hands wet in the snow instead of bare hands that I can wipe off.” But then I decided that warm wet hands were better than cold dry ones. I also put on my thermal top and my wool hat. I looked up at the mountainside again. “How am I going to get down this in the rain?” I asked myself. I looked below me, it was just as steep coming down.

“You should go back,” I said. “The farther you go up, the later it will be, and the more likely it will be to rain on your descent. This is already really dangerous, imagine it in rain where you can’t even see where you’re going. Besides, who are you doing this for? Are you doing it for you? Do you so want to reach that hut or feel like you’ve climbed a mountain? You’re the only one who’s making this progress, you going back down now is only affecting you.”
And I pictured hiking up this snow, for two more hours, at a snails’ pace, constantly falling into the snow and catching myself, literally falling up the mountainside. It seemed wrong, it seemed stupid, it seemed pointless. But part of me felt like there was a top to the mountainside, that there actually was a way to get there and that I actually could get to the top, if I kept going.
I took another step and fell into the snow again.
And then I kind of whimpered- in fear, confusion, desperation: “I can’t tell if I’m being dangerous or brave. I really don’t know what I should do. It seems stupid to keep going, it seems dangerous to keep going, I can’t possibly make it up this hill like this…”
I thought about what would happen if I kept going, if I mistook the signs on the trail and got lost and couldn't find my way back, if they found my body in the snow.
"I'm not ready to die yet," I thought to myself sadly. "I haven't really loved- like real actual love, and I want to experience that before I die."

And then I stopped. I asked myself what was going on, what it was that was scaring me so much.
“It’s snow…” I answered. “What if I’m not supposed to be in this snow? What if it’s dangerous to be hiking in this snow? What if I can’t make it back down this trail in snow?”
“Snow?” I asked myself.

“It’s just snow,” I answered myself, matter- of- factly.  And I looked at the mountainside and saw that it was just snow. It was the snow that was scaring me but I also saw that it was just snow. “It’s just snow,” I explained to myself, and then I smiled.

And then I reminded myself that I had hiked in snow before, without crampons, and in the rain (in the alps in Norway). And I reminded myself that when I had hiked in snow in Norway, I had followed the steps of the guy in front of me so that I wouldn’t have to make a shelf in the snow each time and so this was different, harder because I had to make my own way. And then I remembered what I had learned, that you could kind of waddle up the hillside, turn your feet out and step up that way.
So that’s what I did, I waddled up the hillside, step by step, and started to make progress. I slipped a couple times, fell through the snow a few times, but each time reminded myself of my experiences in Norway, how that’s just what happens when you hike in the snow.
I finally made it to the top of that mountainside and told myself that I was done.  I had come to the point where I was absolutely terrified by what I was doing and completely unsure of what to do next. And I had met it, seen it for what it was, and done what was appropriate in the situation. Whether I made it to the hut or not was inconsequential at that point- what was important was what I had done: feared an impossible task, seen what it was that made it seem impossible, and relied on my wisdom to make the choice about what to do with it.
And at that point, I was ready to go on. I was fine, it really was just snow. And I kept hiking, and it kept being scary: the trail was frequently unmarked, there were parts where I had to climb under trees, hold on to rocks that slipped, pull myself up and around tree roots and boulders, and often search in several directions before seeing another red ribbon telling me where to go. I considered stopping several more times- especially when I would look at my watch and consider how much longer it would take me just to get to the hut and how miserable the trek would be on the way back down, in the rain.

I finally reached a part where the snow actually leveled off but it was at that point that I totally lost the trail. There were no red markers, anywhere that I could see and I had no idea where to go. There were small trees everywhere but I couldn’t see a path through them.
“If this is the hut…” I thought to myself, because often, the last part of the trail is the most difficult and frequently, they don’t mark when you’re near the hut because they figure you can find your way there by sight. But then I looked at my watch- it had only been two and a half hours. There was no way I had climbed 6000 feet in two and a half hours. I had no choice but to keep walking in one direction, so I did. Eventually, I got to a clearing with a steep snow bank. I looked up to my left and saw… the hut!

“This can’t be the hut,” I thought. “It has to be another hut.” I confirmed with myself, and then I laughed.

“Oh yeah, it’s that other hut, ‘cause there are so many huts up here at 6000 feet. Your hut, it’s another two hours away, this is just this other hut that’s not on the map, that’s just a pit stop on the way…”

And I decided that it didn’t matter what hut it was, I was at a hut, and I had made it.

But then, as is always the case, it was super hard to actually get to the hut. I struggled up the snow bank a ton of times but never was able to get up it. I finally hiked around it and walked up to the door of the hut. There were only a couple of people inside. I said the name of the hut, with a questioning sound, to the people who worked there. They nodded, and then laughed to each other, probably making the same joke that I had: Really? Like this would be some other hut.

I sat down, in disbelief that I had made it to the hut in two and a half hours. I watched the TV showing beautiful images of the nature in the area and really wanted a bowl of warm soup of a cup of hot cocoa. But the chalkboard menu was in Japanese and no one really seemed to be serving. I didn’t really want to ask because I didn’t know the word for soup in Japanese and didn’t know how to order from the menu either.

So, I got back up, and headed outside. I started to walk around the hut and that’s when I saw the incredible view from the hut. This was what the man at the hostel had been talking about- not the view as you were hiking up the trail, the view from the top. There was an entire new set of peaks from this vantage point. I had hiked to the top of the ridge of the valley I had been hiking in the day before and was now at the peak from which I could see the next set of peaks and they were amazing. I couldn’t believe the beauty. I wanted to walk toward it, but it meant walking downhill, and I didn’t want to walk downhill because I didn’t want to walk up anything at that point. But it was too pretty, I just had to.

So I did, I walked down a bit and sat. I enjoyed the beautiful mountains from a flat rock. Then I heard some hikers coming from the ridge below and decided to get up and get out of their way. I walked back to the hut, paid them to refill my water bottle, and decided that it would be best for me to head back down, while it still wasn’t raining.

I struggled my way down the snow bank and my left foot fell straight through the snow while I was stepping. I ended up straining my left knee as the rest of me went forward while my leg stood still in the snow. I lifted my leg out of the snow and felt grateful that it had happened after hiking up. I took it easy as I worked my way back down the trail.

As I came to the snowy forest, I found that it was my own footsteps that I was following, to find my way through the snow.

“Well that’s just poignant,” I thought. “Those very same steps of fear and uncertainty are the ones that are guiding me now.”

I made a point to take a photograph of the steep mountainside that had paralyzed me but that I had overcome and joked about the fact that when I saw it, it would probably seem like nothing. And that’s exactly what happened. It wasn’t until I got to the bottom of the mountainside that it occurred to me that I might have just come down that extremely steep slope and when I looked up, I saw that it was. It’s hard to tell whether it seemed smaller because I was coming down it instead of up it but in the photo, it looks like just a hillside- and believe me, I did everything I could to make it look as steep as it felt.

In writing this I see that this was a big moment for me, but maybe not so dramatic for others. But it doesn’t really matter. What I saw from this was that I was faced with the impossible- I genuinely believed that it was life threatening for me to continue up that mountain- and that in that situation I stopped. I looked at what actually was happening and because I saw it for what it was, it became possible. A real situation turned from life threatening to just snow and that allowed me to do it, to do what I was capable of doing all along.

This gives me great courage and faith in this practice. If I can go from being terrified by something to choosing to do it, simply by stopping, seeing things as they are, and using my wisdom to carry on, then I can do anything. And I can do it, because of me- not because of will-power or determination or stick-to-it-iveness, but by awareness of what is actually happening and then self actualization- awareness of my own abilities and the confidence to use them to do something which terrifies me.