Climbing my own mountains

Life has new beginnings all the time. Every day has a new sunrise, every new friend you meet has a smile, every new memory brings new emotions that can elicit laughter, tears and everything else in between.

The problem with life is that some people are often only willing to begin something they think will make them happy in the end. I just had a chat with a good friend about whether or not to love someone, even though the relationship is "doomed" to fail. I told him that, on a practical level, it would be better not to go into it if it was so serious, because the pain would almost be unbearable at the end.

However, I also feel that life is not about the missed opportunities, the blown chances, the lasting regrets that we will never be able to make right. Life is about risking, each and every day, what contentment we might already have... because how can we truly be content when we don't know if we've tested our own limits? How can we be content when the only valley we know is the one we've lived in all our lives? Some days, wouldn't it just be cool to go climb up that scary mountain that casts a shadow over us everyday?

That's what I'm doing right now: climbing my own mountains. I'm not sure what I may see on the other side, or even if there will BE another side... but I do know that staying put won't ever make me happy. Not if there's a chance, small as it may be, that there's a more beautiful place somewhere not too far away.

My friend and I eventually settled upon the ideal that life is too damn short to be wasted by NOT choosing to love someone. I told him to go for it, because life is not complete without at least one tragic love story. :) I should know... I've had my fair share. But, really, how many opportunities do we get in life to love the person we truly want to love? When the chance presents itself, you MUST take it. There's really no other way to act.

Someone once asked Sir Edmund Hillary, the great mountaineer who, along with Tenzing Norgay, was the first to scale Mt. Everest, why he climbed the mountain. His response?

"Because it was there."

And THAT is why, if you ever need to find me, you'll have to look up a bit, into the shadows of the great mountain. I'll be somewhere up there.