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It’s true. My mum climbed Snowdon whilst she was pregnant with me and as a baby I was carried, pushed and hoisted up and over various hills and crags. As soon as I could walk I was toddling up to ‘The Cloud’, when I could run I raced my dad up the Langdale Pikes and when I was older I scrambled to the top of Helvellyn.
For me it’s not the climb that’s enjoyable - I huff and puff my way to the top – it’s reaching the summit and looking down on the sprawling scenery beneath me that inspires me to climb again and again. From the instance I’m at the mountain’s peak I’m captivated and the feeling in that moment is like no other. The sense of power at being on top of the world coupled with the humbling feeling of my own insignificance amidst these mighty giants is exhilarating and something you can only truly experience when faced with true natural beauty.
To me, mountains were things that represented finding my own way in life and the awe and wonder that such a quest provoked; horizons aren’t set in stone when climbing mountains: they change with the altitude and the curiosity to see what’s over the next peak pushes me to take another step.
But there’s another side to mountains that I didn’t realise until recently, whilst they may be figures of solitary exploration and personal ambition, they are also a symbol of the help that we all need in life sometimes, for when I reached the summit I always take a moment to look down and find the path that got me there - sure enough it was littered with memories of the people with me.
There was the tree where I stopped to rest and my mum stopped too, so I didn’t feel bad. There was the stepping stone across the ghyll where my dad offered me his hand to help me cross. There was the cave where my brothers had rushed ahead to hide in, so that they could jump out at me when I arrived. There was the rock where we all sat to eat sandwiches, not talking a lot, just content to be together.
These days I face different mountains; mountains of indeterminate height, where the summit is shrouded in mist and uncertainty. The path directly in front of me seems to be heading somewhere but there are occasions where I get lost. Coming to University has changed my perspective of things and I’ve been faced with challenges that I’ve had to overcome without ever really knowing what they were all for.
There are moments when I stop and look around to find that the view from here is actually pretty great and that I’m lucky to have gotten this far, but then there’s the nagging feeling that I’ve got so much further to go. That not-so-distant future that lingers beyond graduating is the cloudy summit: and all I can do is keep walking and hope that I’m making the right decisions. My family can’t be with me all the time, there are things I have to do alone, but the support that they’ve given me in the past keeps me believing that they’ll be there at the final ascent; that somewhere up there is my mum, waiting to be kind, my dad waiting to help me up and my brothers waiting to surprise me.
And I can’t let them down.
I promise myself that it will all be worth it and that up there, above the clouds, is a horizon like no other.
But there are times when I wish I could be climbing simple mountains like before...
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