The Mountains We Choose and the Challenges We Don’t

Some of the hardest moments of my life have happened far from a mountain. Building Life Happens Outdoors. Going through divorce. Being held at gunpoint. Losing people I love. These experiences belong to different parts of my life, but when I look at what helped me face them, the mountain path is always there.

The choices I made to walk that path gave me something I could draw on when the challenge was no longer mine to choose. They gave me practice in focusing when I felt overwhelmed, finding a way forward through uncertainty, and trusting that I could respond even when I could not see how everything would work out.

That is a large part of why I believe in doing difficult things.

Learning through the body

You can spend a great deal of time thinking about the person you want to become. More patient. More focused. More confident in your ability to handle whatever comes. I have done that thinking too. But there is a particular kind of understanding that comes when you have to put those intentions into practice through your body.

On a long mountain day, patience becomes the pace you can sustain. Focus becomes paying attention to the ground beneath your feet. Responsibility becomes looking after yourself and noticing how the people beside you are doing. These ideas become actions, repeated through the hours.

The physical effort gives the mind something immediate to work with. There is a route to follow, a decision to make, a task that needs your attention. When the whole day feels too large, you can return to what is required of you now. You learn to spend less energy arguing with the size of the challenge and more energy responding to the part that is in front of you.

For me, this is how the body trains the mind. Through practice. You experience uncertainty, pay attention, make a considered choice and discover what follows. Sometimes you move forward. Sometimes you rest, ask for help or change direction. Each experience gives you a more honest understanding of your abilities and your limits.

There is judgment in that process too. The mountains require you to distinguish between an effort you can sustain and a situation that needs a different response. Conditions matter. Preparation matters. The people guiding you matter. Learning to listen is as much a part of growing as learning to persist.

And somewhere in that repeated effort, trust in yourself begins to take shape. You have memories to draw on. You can remember a difficult stretch you worked through, something unfamiliar you learned, or a decision you made with care. Your confidence starts to rest on experience.

What I carried into building LHO

Building Life Happens Outdoors has asked me to draw on that experience many times. There is a particular uncertainty in trying to bring something into existence. You have an idea of what it could become, but you still have to live through the distance between that idea and the reality.

The mountains helped me understand that distance. A direction can be clear while much of the path remains unknown. You prepare as well as you can, take responsibility for the next decision and keep learning as you go. You also have to be willing to revise your approach when what you discover asks something different of you.

I have carried that into building LHO. The patience to stay with work that takes time. The focus to deal with a problem without allowing it to become the whole story. The willingness to ask questions and rely on people whose abilities complement my own. The belief that uncertainty still leaves room for useful action.

These qualities matter in a career, in entrepreneurship, in raising a family, in learning something new. Choosing a demanding experience can give us a place to practise them before we need them elsewhere.

But the connection runs deeper than ambition. Much of life’s difficulty has nothing to do with the goals we set ourselves.

The challenges that arrive without our permission

We can choose whether to start a business or attempt a climb. We have much less say over when illness enters our lives, when someone we love dies, or how age changes the body we have always depended on. Even a life carefully arranged around comfort can contain moments that ask more of us than we feel ready to give.

Being held at gunpoint is part of my own understanding of that. When I look back on it, I am reminded of how abruptly circumstances can move beyond our control. Divorce and loss brought that understanding into other parts of my life. The path ahead can change, including the future you thought you were moving towards.

In those moments, the mountain path was there for me. I could draw on the familiarity of meeting something difficult without having every answer. I could return to the question of what was possible now, rather than demand that I understand the rest of my life all at once.

A climb cannot reproduce the experience of violence, divorce or bereavement. Each has its own weight. What I carried between them was a way of approaching uncertainty: paying attention, accepting the reality in front of me, seeking support and finding the next action I could take.

Sometimes that action is very small. A conversation. A practical responsibility. Letting someone know you are struggling. Allowing yourself time before making a decision. There are periods when getting through the day takes the same patience and care that a much more visible achievement once required.

This is where I have found the mountain lessons most valuable. They have helped me recognise that a difficult day does not have to contain the answer to every day that follows it.

Knowing that the path is my own

The path also taught me something that became especially important later in life: it is my own. Nobody else could fully understand it, and I did not need them to. Their understanding was never a condition I had to satisfy before choosing the direction of my life.

I learned early on to drown out the question, “Why do you do that to yourself?” Alongside it came all the opinions about which direction I should take, what I should want, and whether the effort made sense.

I was sent the “Everest is littered with highly ambitious dead people” meme again and again. Some of the people whose deaths were being reduced to a punchline had been friends of mine. I had to learn to hear my own reasons through that noise. The choices that brought me into the mountains meant something to me. I was the one who had to live them.

That lesson became particularly useful during my divorce. Towards the end, its public nature brought pressure to justify, to explain and to defend my position and my choices. A deeply personal part of my life had become visible to others, and with that visibility came the expectation of an explanation.

But to whom? To what end? And, most particularly, why?

Those questions brought me back to something I had already learned on the mountain path. I had to be honest with myself about my choices, understand my reasons and take responsibility for the direction I was taking. I could do that without turning my life into an argument for public approval. Other people could have their opinions. It is easy to have an opinion about a life you do not have to live. I still had to live mine.

My path is my own to justify to myself. That understanding gave me a form of steadiness I needed. It allowed me to trust a choice without requiring everyone else to understand it, and to keep moving in a direction that made sense to me while accepting that it might never make sense to them.

Making room for the soul

There is also something the mountains have given me that is harder to describe in the language of skills. When I talk about training the soul, I mean the part of us that holds our sense of meaning, our relationships and our willingness to remain open to life.

In loss, that part of us can feel deeply shaken. The person who is gone matters. The relationship that has ended matters. Moving forward does not make either of those things less important. I have found room on the mountain path to carry that truth without needing to resolve it.

Physical movement can give me a way to be present with what I am feeling. There is space for sadness, for memory, for gratitude, and for the world around me to reach me as well. The effort and the emotion can exist together. I can continue to participate in life while still acknowledging what hurts.

That has changed how I understand strength. There is strength in remaining able to feel. In letting people matter to you. In accepting help when you need it. A mountain journey depends on attention to others, and I have come to value that same connection when the difficulty is personal.

Trust in yourself belongs here too. It includes trusting that you can adapt, learn and accept support when the way forward is different from the one you imagined. It leaves room for vulnerability. It allows success to mean rebuilding a life, caring for someone, or finding moments of meaning in circumstances you would never have chosen.

Choosing where to begin

Mountaineering has been one of my paths into this understanding. Trekking can offer its own version of it. So can learning an unfamiliar skill or taking a step beyond a routine that has become too small for you. The scale of the challenge is personal. What matters is that it asks you to engage, learn and make choices with care.

You do not need to begin with someone else’s mountain. You can begin with an experience that suits your circumstances and stretches you enough to require attention, preparation and appropriate support. Afterwards, take time to understand what happened. What did you learn about yourself? What helped when you struggled? Where did you need someone else? What might you carry into ordinary life?

For me, that reflection is part of the training. It connects the physical experience to the person I am becoming. It helps me recognise abilities I can use again, while remaining honest about what I still need to learn.

I cannot know which challenges are still ahead of me. What I do know is that the paths I chose have been there when life asked me to walk paths I never wanted. They have given me memories of finding my footing, people to turn to, and a deeper trust in my ability to meet what is in front of me.

That is what I hope people carry home from an adventure with us: an understanding of themselves they can return to in the ordinary work of living, and in the moments when that work becomes unexpectedly hard. The mountain path has been there for me in those moments. It is one of the deepest reasons I continue to choose it.

CONTINUE YOUR RESEARCH