10th January 2021
Week 02/52
⛰ Climb
Note on seat at Mount Arthur Hut
Q: How many times do we have to do something before it becomes a tradition?
This week I had the chance to go up Mount Arthur (the tallest peak in Kahurangi National Park)
It’s a treat to be able to climb the view I spend most days looking at.
I’ve done this same walk around the same time for the last six years although only made it to the top the last two.
At the first hut there is a curious engraving on one of the seats (weirdly cut off by one of the posts from the hut):
I expect to pass through this world but once.
Any good, therefore, that I can do
or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature,
let me do it now.
Let me not defer or neglect it
for I shall not pass this way again.
(Apparently this is an old Quaker saying, possibly originally by Etienne de Grellet du Mabillier, but this is disputed)
I’ve caught myself mourning the loss of international travel recently. I’m not angry that I can’t travel - there is literally no where I’d want to go at the moment. I’m just sad that something I used to enjoy a lot is no longer an option. The list of places I may never visit again, or even for the first time, gets longer.
But, being out in a massive National Park is a good reminder that travel is like counting to infinity. There are more interesting places to go within easy driving distance of where I live than I could reasonably visit in my lifetime. And orders of magnitude more than that if I include the places I can still fly, including some inexcusable omissions from my “places I’ve been in NZ” list (like, cough, the East Coast).
Gotta stop feeling sorry for the things I don’t have and start making more of what I’ve got.
📖 Read
I recently published a new post:
tl;dr if you’re struggling with how to improve the diversity of your board or executive team but still want to hire on merit and don’t like quotas (or you know somebody else like this), then maybe think about what rugby teams and rowing squads can teach us…
👴🏻 Age
Today is my birthday. I’m 45 years old.
That’s elapsed time. For the last couple of years I’ve had my biogenic age calculated and in the last 12 months that went from 48 to 46. So I feel like I got three years back in that equation.
But, however we calculate it, each year it gets harder to avoid the fact that I’m likely in the second half of my life.
I saw a headline this week which was a younger person talking about their “quarter life crisis” and my immediate reaction was “oh just fuck off!” So I’m that old.
I have a whole post to publish at some stage about this, mostly inspired by people I know who are either desperately trying to rewind the clock or, on the other hand, suddenly realising that they haven’t really moved on in 10+ years while their friends have all grown up. But here is the guts:
We only get to be each age once.
Q: What are the things I can only do, be and have now?