What's Your Reason?

November 17 2023 Day 17

Eleven years ago, this week, Tough Cookie and I touched the great, old fireplace atop Mount Starr King to conclude our year long journey of the 52 With a View.

That book, the first one. was not yet written. There’s been nine since.

Uma was not yet born. The kids’ grandmother and my father were still with us to cheer us on.

My whole life today, sometimes, feels wholly contained within the framework of these past 4,000 or so days. I think often of that journey. I can't imagine any of us knew what was coming after, how those days would change us.

This all seems relevant today on National Take a Hike Day. (It’s actually called National Hiking Day but I prefer the concept of telling somebody to go take a hike!)

Since that day, because of hiking, I’ve witnessed the moon rise over Mount Everest. I’ve walked through the sugar cane fields of India. I’ve bonded with Little Bean and written two field guides with her because of hikes. I’ve lived for a week at the summit of Mount Washington.

Walking, alone, through the woods, has brought me strength and comfort.

That final mountain that Tough Cookie and I climbed all those years ago, by the way, is named after Thomas Starr King, a deeply empathetic Unitarian minister who was passionately pro-Union and spent years after the Civil War raising money for the United States Sanitary Commission, a predecessor to the American Red Cross.

Starr King wrote, “Be sure of the foundation of your life. Know why you live as you do. Be ready to give a reason for it. Do not, in such a matter as life, build an opinion or custom on what you guess is true. Make it a matter of certainty and science.”

On that day atop the mountain with the ten-year-old I consider to be my first daughter, I never felt more certain. I would write. I would take these stories to people. I would do art. I would somehow pay my bills. I would leave a legacy for Janelle, and now for Uma.

I have mostly done those things, though some better than others. I try every day to do more and do it better. I fail more than I let on.

And plans change, of course, along with life. I now head up a library - an honest to gosh library, a life twist I never saw coming, but here we are.

I realize that I have no moral today, no insight to make this all appear a little less self- conscious. So instead I'll just be struck by awe that so much can happen in such a short amount of time. And how grateful I am.

Maybe someday my kids will read all this stuff and cringe, maybe not. I don't know. But if I don't write them, my heart will likely burst, so I better keep going.

Be ready to give a reason for it, the preacher said. How ready are you? What’s your reason? Let's go!