Every once in a while, I lose sight of the mountain.
Nothing happens.
That's the strange part.
Nobody dies.
Nobody leaves.
No terrible phone call comes.
The business doesn't collapse.
There isn't even necessarily something I can point to and say, That's why I feel this way.
I just wake up one morning and the horizon is gone.
Imagine you're somewhere in a wide open wilderness.
You're several days into a long hike, and somewhere in the distance is a spectacular mountain range.
You've been walking toward it for days. . . weeks. . . years.
Some days you can see every ridge. Sometimes, it's just a blue silhouette on the horizon.
But it's there.
It tells you where you're going.
It beckons you forward.
Then one morning you crawl out of your tent and it's gone.
Not diminished.
Gone.
Yesterday you were living inside a Peter Jackson movie.
Today it looks like Nebraska in February.
What you don't know, standing there on the ground, is that a low bank of clouds has settled across the horizon.
The mountains haven't moved an inch.
But you can't see them.
And we tend to put an extraordinary amount of faith in what we can see.
So you start wondering.
Was I wrong about where I was going?
Was there ever really anything out there?
What am I walking toward anyway?
Eventually comes the biggest question.
What's the point?
I know this place.
For me, it isn't quite depression.
Depression has a quality I can usually recognize.
There is sadness in it.
Grief. Loneliness. Fear.
Sometimes I know exactly where it came from.
Sometimes I don't.
But I know I'm hurting.
This is different.
There is a word for the absence of pleasure or interest in things that normally matter to us: anhedonia.
I've experienced it occasionally in my life, and I've come to think of it differently from sadness.
Sadness hurts.
But anhedonia?
Anhedonia persuades.
It doesn't necessarily tell you that life is terrible.
It quietly suggests that perhaps none of it matters very much.
The things you were excited about yesterday seem strangely arbitrary.
The future that recently felt full of possibility suddenly looks like an intellectual construction you invented to keep yourself moving.
Hope begins to feel less like something you're temporarily unable to access and more like a hypothesis whose experiment has finally been completed.
Result: False.
And if you've ever been there, you know how convincing that can feel.
But I've learned something from my time in nature.
You should not navigate by visibility when visibility is temporarily impaired.
A competent mountaineer who wakes up in a whiteout doesn't conclude that north has ceased to exist.
He doesn't decide the mountain must have disappeared overnight.
And he certainly doesn't start marching confidently in some random direction because movement feels better than standing still.
He trusts what he knew before the weather changed.
He does what experience has told him to do. . .
He makes camp.
I think we need permission to do that in our lives.
There are days for ambition.
Days for reinvention.
Days for quitting the wrong job, starting the company, asking her out, ending the relationship, buying the ticket, making the move, writing the book.
And there are days when you shouldn't make any important decisions at all.
I've started thinking about those days as bad-visibility days.
When I cannot see the mountain, I don't make decisions about the mountain.
I don't decide my work is meaningless.
I don't decide I'm going to be alone forever.
I don't decide I've wasted my life.
I don't decide the dream was stupid.
I don't decide hope was naïve.
Those are navigational decisions.
And I'm currently standing in fog.
So I make camp.
Eat something.
Take a shower.
Turn the phone off.
Get warm.
Talk to somebody.
Sleep.
Tomorrow, if the clouds are still there, I stay another day.
But I don't burn the map.
Because here's the part that's difficult to remember when you're standing on the ground. . .
Weather changes.
Geography doesn't.
The mountain that disappeared this morning may be sitting exactly where it was yesterday.
And sometimes you get proof.
A few days ago I couldn't see mine.
Nothing catastrophic had happened.
I simply lost contact with the feeling that any particular direction mattered.
So I made camp.
And a couple mornings later, I woke up.
There it was.
The strange little kernel of excitement about life had returned.
The future interested me again.
Nothing external had happened to restore it.
Nobody arrived.
No great opportunity appeared.
No enormous check cleared.
No cosmic question got answered.
The atmosphere changed.
That's all.
And that matters because now I have another piece of evidence to carry with me the next time the clouds roll in.
They will roll in again.
That's life.
So perhaps the goal isn't to guarantee ourselves an unobstructed view of the mountains.
Maybe it's to become experienced enough travelers that we stop panicking every time we can't see them.
Know where you last saw them.
Keep your bearings.
Trust the map.
And when visibility gets bad enough, have the wisdom to stop walking.
Make camp.
Eat.
Get warm.
Sleep.
The mountains will still be there in the morning.
And if you wake up and still can't see them?
Stay put.
Morning will tell you more.
