True story: when I was 13 years old, and just newly arrived in Canada, my dentist was horrified that I had half a tooth stuck in my gums from a failed extraction all these years. He was even more horrified when, later, as they were doing work on my teeth, I did not utter a single word of protest even though I was clearly in a lot of pain.
Cue in to about ten years later: same thing, only in childbirth. Lots of words of praise from my doctors on my charts. Apparently, I just like to walk into the hospital and get things done.
It’s not that I don’t feel pain, although I’ve been accused of this on occasion (sorry–I’ve been accused of being incapable of feeling at all). I just find that a lot of things get done faster if I barrel through them. Complaining does a lot to relieve pent-up feelings of frustration and rage, but to me, it’s just an added distraction. A good example of this is on the trail. Once in a while, I’ll fall on my knees or sprain an ankle. and I have the choice of a.) complain about the pain, costing us an extra five minutes because no helicopter is coming to pick me up anytime soon or b.) shake it off, maybe rest for a few seconds, distract myself with happy thoughts, and keep walking.
Keep walking; I think, in so many ways, this has become the mantra of my life. I had a baby in college, and when I returned to finish my diploma, I was faced with trudging through seemingly endless days of tests and motherhood and real life’s other problems. Did I mention I was getting into Engineering? And that I was not particularly talented in Math? But it had to get done, one foot in front of the other. Some days I got out of bed and into school before the sun rose with no memory of how I got there. I would subsist on Monster and chips and spend way too much time in the library, timing my sleeping patterns and cramming sessions to perfectly coincide with exams. On weekends, I finished structural engineering practice problems while folding clothes and entertaining a toddler. Those days I spent alone, because my husband had to work on weekends to make ends meet–his own mountain to climb, his own sort of trudging.
Life is just like so many of our trips. You see this gargantuan mountain in the distance, and at some point it occurs to you that to get there, you have to scrape through the rest of the trail. And talking about how tough it is is fine, as long as you move. If you stop moving, you’ll never get there. You can camp at the side of the trail…first flat patch you see, but you still wouldn’t have gotten there. And if it is important to you, you will always wonder what there looks like. If it is truly important to you, all the excuses in the world will pale in comparison to what you haven’t done, no matter the circumstances.
Over the weekend, we reached the end of a hike that has been on my mind for over two years, never mind the added baggage of an extra child and a 4-year-old that had to do it with us. My there (because yours would look different, because we are all such amazingly diverse, wonderful beings) looked like this:
And it was worth all the pain.
