The Eternal Climb.
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“We construct our models of progression on a gradient. We move on up, or sink back down. It is harder to do the former than the latter, but that makes it only more admirable. One does not, under any linguistic circumstances, progress down. Most religions operate on a vertical axis in which heaven or their analogue of that state is up, and its opposite is down. To ascend, therefore, is in some fundamental way to approach divinity.”
— Robert Macfarlane
“I wonder what it would be like for us to linger a little bit longer in the richness of darkness. I know darkness is not easy. It can feel oppressive and isolating. But I want us to reimagine darkness as a place of imagination, of gestation, of silence, of mystery. Something happens in the darkness that all of life depends upon.”
— Francis Weller
I’m attending a spoken word event this evening. The theme is the metaphor of mountains - climbing something, facing challenges, overcoming the odds. I’ve put my name in the hat to read in the open mic section of the evening. If my name is called, this is what I’ll be reading:
It was a blazing hot, sunny day five years ago in South London when I first spoke to a therapist.
I was pushing my bike through a landscaped park filled with young sunbathers and families, Londoners who rush to the nearest public space and strip off at the merest sign of sunlight, like sea lions basking on a rock.
I had arranged to speak with a few therapists, ‘chemistry calls’ as we call them in this line of work, and I was about to have the first of them. For some reason I can’t remember, perhaps a lack of thought altogether, I decided a public park would be an ideal place to have this conversation, a casual chit-chat as I walked around some trees.
Yet all it took was one question to break me open. “So”, began the therapist, “Why did you want to speak with me?”
And it all came rushing forward then, an unstoppable torrent of things I’d never said out loud, never said to anyone. Decades of pain and confusion, pouring out of me.
And with those words, like some movie cliche, came a flood of tears. I stopped walking, leaned my bike against a tree, leaned against the tree myself, doubled over and wept. The more I talked, the more I wept and with each rush of tears came a fresh wave of relief, an unburdening.
But allow me to rewind briefly. A few weeks before this moment in the park, I had been dating someone for a few months. She was smart, fierce, beautiful, and, as I was to discover, possessed a spooky level of intuition. I loved spending time with her - but I had also realised there was no romantic energy, no magic spark.
When we finally kissed, I knew this for sure, and I felt a great wave of sadness, with a sense of a door closing for good on a future I longed for. When I later told her that I didn’t think ours was a romantic relationship, she replied, “No shit. I’ve never had a kiss so devoid of passion.”
And then she said, “When you walked away, you looked like you were carrying something. Grief. You were carrying grief.”
Plato once said that the experience of hearing something truly wise is not like you’re hearing it for the first time but as something you already knew and had forgotten. Hearing those words “carrying grief”, this was how I felt; some deep truth was revived in me.
And that was the moment that, amongst all my other self-work, all of my own work as a coach, I knew there were corners of myself I could no longer avoid. Places that I needed help to explore.
My conversation with that therapist, in that park, was supposed to last fifteen minutes. But for almost an hour, I stayed leaning against that tree, sobbing and talking as tears fell from my face and into the dry and dusty earth beneath me. As I watched them falling, the droplets twinkling in the sunlight, it was as if I was seeing them clearly for the first time.
After a few months, when my therapist told me our work together was done, I protested. “I don’t feel finished,” I said.
She smiled patiently. “You’re trying to complete yourself, thinking you’re not ready,” she said. “The rest of this work you will do inside a relationship.”
We said goodbye, and four months later I met - another cliche - my soulmate, the woman who would become my wife. Five months after that, I moved to Berlin to live with her. Ten months after that, we got married, and six months after that, she gave birth to a baby boy, and I became a father.
That was three years ago now, and my therapist was right. The ascent continues, but now I have a climbing partner.
Rock bottom, I realise now, had been decades ago in all those troubled times that I’d buried and tried to forget, times spent in a darkness so persistent I’d begun to believe it was normality. Ascendancy was a mere fantasy then.
I’d been climbing out of that place for a long, long time, and now - finally - I’d broken through the clouds to a place I’d heard about but never imagined possible for me.
Not a peak or a summit, but a plateau, a Shambhala, a green upland where I was becoming more whole and more fully in contact with life.
I am, like all of us, perfectly incomplete, strong yet flawed. I’m an experienced climber, pilgrim and guide at the same time.
“So, then, the double-edged sword of wounding. There are wounds that crush the soul, distort and misdirect the energy of life, and those that prompt us to grow up.”
— James Hollis
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.
*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.
[main picture: me, my brother and some friends on a ridgeline in the French Alps]