Tag: Himalayas

Eclecticism

I once had one particularly resonant life truth pinned up on my bulletin board among many other nuggets scribbled on bits of paper that spoke to me.

“Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose.“

It was more a visceral understanding of that truism than an actual “knowing” that spoke to me. No question I was interested in a great many things as a young woman.

Life dictates you cannot possibly pursue all interests that pop up. Not if you want to achieve any depth of success in any chosen field.

In that respect, journalism was a reasonable path to follow. I got to ask lots of questions about lots of things from lots of strangers. And then I could actually publish or broadcast what I learned. I also got into a lot of high priced conferences by flashing my press credentials.

I worried a lot when I was young about the trap of commitment that making choices and becoming successful requires.

What lay under that fear was constantly questioning whether I was good enough to do anything. I understand that is quite common among human beings. Moreso among women I understand.

I can’t imagine why. (That’s sarcasm right there in case I needed to explain…. Girls do that.)

In the upcoming generation, I feel increasing societal pushback against the extreme standards and expectations that are put on women. There used to be a chart that circulated about how women’s leadership skills compared to how men’s skills were characterized.

He was assertive. She was bossy. He was determined. She was pushy. And so on.

It has always been a devil’s bargain. No matter how well women do, it seems, someone is always ready to “qualify” their success. It took me a long time to understand that.

So I bounced around a lot in my so-called career. Had a lot of jobs. Did some of them more or less well.

I actually enjoy being eclectic. It beats the heck out of being docile and predictable. At least that is what I told myself. Often.

Looking back, I see the truth that eclecticism was self-defeating in respects. But I also dodged a lot of bullets.

I watched senior, single academic women nursing Manhattans in bars after classes were done. I watched another former peer striding proudly as the flag bearer at the front of the annual academic procession during encaenias.

I have watched peers and colleagues zig when maybe they should have zagged at certain junctures in their lives. I know I did a few times.

All the intensity and love they poured into their careers and the strangers that once perpetually peopled their days have now disappeared. They are left with themselves and what is left from that life to comfort them in their dotage.

That seems like a very poor bargain to strike in life to me. Maybe I am speaking from a place of security and safety I had never previously known. Maybe I am a jerk and the truth is I couldn’t keep a job to save my life so naturally, I kept moving forward and moving around.

But I look back on some of those eclectic experiences with satisfaction and huge measure of gratitude for having done some of the things I did.

Trips to the Arctic, Argentina, across the Andes, all over Europe and parts of Asia. High up into the Himalayas. I saw some things that won’t leave until I do.

Young people now seem to prefer collecting experiences over “things” as our parents and grandparents might have. Vast amounts of material possessions are fated for the garbage dump when boomers start kicking off in droves.

I am of the Boomer generation and feel blessed to have adopted a life strategy of accumulating experiences over everything else well before my time.

I am not promoting eclecticism as an optimum life choice. I get and have experienced that spreading your interests too thin can backfire on you.

But I will argue I really didn’t feel I had much other choice. In my bouncing from thing to thing and author to author and one philosophy over another, I finally landed in a place where I feel myself settled and grounded.

For today anyway. It is both the curse and certainty of having an eclectic bent of mind that nothing is ever settled “finally and forever.” Not until death, perhaps, and lately I’ve been questioning if seeking will end even then.

I guess one day I’ll find out. For now, I’m going to scan my eclectic collection selection of saved recipes and see what dish I can concoct that I’ve never made before to see how it works out.

Seems like how I have greeted every day and experience since I’ve been on the planet. Why quit now.

Come Fly With Me

Today’s writing prompt: What is something you would attempt, if you were guaranteed not to fail?

What wouldn’t I attempt? Without question, the biggest challenge I would tackle would be to become a pilot. The urge to travel and fly was in me from an early age.

At 17, I applied to be an airline stewardess with a small regional airline in the Eastern part of Canada. The rejection letter was partly disappointing and partly heartening. I was too young to be hired they told me. But they encouraged me to apply again when I turned 19.

As fate would have it, by the time I was 19, I had been accepted at university. That sealed my fate for the following four years and many years that followed. Still, I worked in a good deal of flying in those university years.

I travelled twice to Europe twice between academic semesters. At the end of third year, I spent a summer in Egypt on a student seminar with about 50 other Canadians.

Following graduation, I travelled to Asia and throughout Sri Lanka, India and Nepal. You may have read of my trek through the Himalayas .

My husband was a commercial airline pilot. The irony and suitability of our union has not been lost on me. While I was schlepping from country to country on this airline or another as a passenger, he was actually flying the planes. Our paths never crossed in those days but we laugh at the possibility that they certainly might have.

My husband was a pioneer in the age of commercial flight. He flew for Pan American World Airways for 20 years until its’ untimely demise in 1991. The death of that iconic airline marked a sea change in the history of aviation.

Pan Am set the bar for class, luxury and service. I marveled that prime rib roast was not only served at seat side in Pan Am’s first class section, but had been roasted in the airline galley. Passengers got to choose their preferred cut. The wine selection rivaled a 5-star Michelin restaurant. Caviar was a standard “appetizer.”

My husband tells stories of the many glamorous passengers he ferried back and forth across the oceans. Elizabeth Taylor. Maggie Smith (who hated to fly). Flip Wilson (funny as hell.) Duke Ellington (wore a dewrag.) Burt Lancaster (shorter than he looked onscreen).

In one poignant story about a stewardess he tells how excited she was to serve Rock Hudson in first class. But her heart quietly broke after sharing her excitement with her galley colleagues. It was only then she learned Hudson’s male travel companion was also his boyfriend.

I had heard of Pan Am off in the distance. Ephemerally. I never flew on it. As a Canadian, we had other choices for European and international travel. It is my loss. The Pan Am logo on the side of a 747 was an iconic symbol in countless movies and TV shows. My husband refers to the cockpit of a 747 as his “office.”

Pan Am stories still drift through the world and are recounted by many people we meet – whether travelers or employees, always recounted with a certain wistfulness and joy. Pan Am employees seemed to universally love working at Pan Am.

My husband’s stories are full of glamor and fun they had both on the aircraft and during layovers. Pan Am employees believed – it is said – that “the world is my oyster.” When Pan Am declared bankruptcy in 1991, and went out of business, some employees committed suicide.

There are still Pan Am clubs in many places where there are still enough ex-employees to justify them. There is a Pan Am museum in Florida. You can still buy Pan Am “merch” and memorabilia online.

Today there are many female commercial airline pilots. Had I been born later, I might have been one of them. My husband and I often talk about the unlikelihood of our meeting in the first place. It was on an online dating site, not a normal domain for either of us. I was in Canada. He was in the US.

Along with the mysteries of falling in love, we talked with familiarity about restaurants and sites we saw in Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Rome, Paris, Munich and many other international capitals. In one conversation, he finally gave up asking me which countries I had visited: “This might go faster if you just tell me which countries you haven’t visited.” It still makes us chuckle.

No chance of failure? I’d be in a flight simulator somewhere in a New York minute. I’d abandon a lot of other dreams to pursue the goal of becoming a pilot.

And who knows? I ain’t dead yet. The game isn’t over until the fat lady sings. Of course, that phrase means one should not presume to know the outcome of an event which is still in progress.

Which is – in this case – my life.

So we’ll see.

Keep Going

The halfway point in any project, plan, a life is usually a time for stocktaking and reflection.

I remember getting halfway through my last degree and I really wanted to throw in the towel. I didn’t in the end, but I wanted to. So why didn’t I?

Self-respect was a factor. I am not a quitter and it is both a strength and a weakness that once I commit to something, I stay the course. In this example, quite literally and figuratively.

Sometimes backtracking is as unattractive an option as going forward. Imagine being on Mt. Everest halfway to the summit. You have planned that trip for months, maybe years.

And when you find yourself in a whiteout blizzard at one of the most treacherous junctions on the mountain, your choices are pretty much prescribed.

This is a challenge you are unlikely to tackle again (though astonishingly, many do). There has been a huge investment of time, energy, hope and money in thrashing out the logistics. For mountain climbers, I gather the inherent danger and many uncertainties in scaling mountains are what make the attempt appealing.

So you’re in. It is only when that blizzard comes up and your toes or fingers or tip of your nose are starting to turn into that ominous shade of opaque white that signals frostbite that mild panic may set in.

Well, it would for me anyway. I am sure there are lots of mountain climbers out there for whom missing digits and raggedy nostrils or earlobes are marks of triumph. They are if you are in a room talking to them. That means they didn’t lose the major bits at a punishing altitude in the Himalayas.

I dabbled in adventure but was never all all-in. I trekked in the Himalayas when Nepal was still quite closed off to the rest of the world. My trek took me through some of the most visually stunning landscapes I’d ever seen. Snow-capped mountains highlighted against a bright blue sky under the midday sun.

Rhododendron forests as high as our North American maple trees and gushing with blooms of bright red, dark pink and light pink. I remember stopping at a rock rest cairn along that stretch and just sitting for an hour taking it all in.

On that trek, I was headed for a temple at Jomson but eventually did quit at about the halfway mark. I was physically done and saw only days of more exertion ahead and moving farther away from civilization. In a profoundly city folk act, I was able to hire a mule train to ride back to Pokhara where the trek had begun. I’d had enough. And riding the mules was pretty cool.

I crossed the Andes from Argentina to Chile on horseback. That was a little different where there were gauchos to guide and cook for us so we were a little more pampered and protected. Which is not to say that there weren’t plenty of petrifying moments. I trusted that the horse did not want to die and had done this trip many times before. Happily, my trust paid off. Else I wouldn’t be writing this post.

So my offloading and decluttering project is at about the halfway mark. I would love nothing more than to collect my gear, pack up my tent and walk away leaving behind the mountain of tasks yet to do.

But I won’t. That self-respect thing has kicked in again. I have started something and I will damn well finish it come hell or high water. Just need to find me a metaphorical stone rest cairn to lean on for awhile to catch my breath.

Then I will lift up my pack and head off down the trail again. All the while scanning the horizon for a metaphorical mule train to scoop me up and make this journey home much more enjoyable.

Winston Churchill famously said: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” Noted.

What’s Your Happy Place?

I recently had cause to think back on some of the places in the world – my world – where I was most happy. Certainly, they were nearly all beautiful and peaceful. But not always. Some were surprisingly comfortable and comforting in unusual ways. I remember happy places where I felt most safe and most seen.

A box of lifejackets, for instance. Traveling as a teenager between Newfoundland and the mainland, I had barely been able to pay the fare for the trip let alone pay extra for sleeping accommodations.

Traveling “suiteless” meant you could end up sleeping on hard plastic theater seats on one end of the boat or the other. There was always the floor if my kit included a sleeping bag and a backpack I could fashion into a pillow. Sometimes I carried a pack but sometimes I didn’t.

To this day, I don’t remember how I discovered the box of life preservers. Natural curiosity I suppose. But I do remember looking into the sturdy grey-painted plywood box full of equally grey PFD’s (personal flotation devices) and having an Aha! moment. There were at least two feet of space between the cover and the lifejackets. I could fit in there. No sweat!

But I was civic-minded and afraid enough of the law to not open up and settle amongst the life preservers without “permission.” I took my idea to a kindly-looking purse nearby. I interpreted his first reaction to my request as not to fetch the law but maybe the whitecoats. Registering how young I was, he quickly softened and granted me “permission” to sleep in the life preserver box overnight.

He added – unnecessarily, I thought: “You’ll have to get out of the box right quick if da passengers need ’em.” The brogue was strong and to me, that meant he had that Newfoundlander born-in-the-bone sensibility about helping your fellow human beings. I slept the sleep of the just on the ferry crossing that night.

Other happy places were further afield in the world. In India, somewhere near New Delhi, I believe it was, a nice young Indian Sikh in a red turban took me to a temple at dusk. The setting sun was that magnificent red and orange and purple that defies description even in pictures. You can only fully appreciate it if you see it for yourself.

At a point, the Sikh raised his hands and clapped. A cacophony of budgerigars came flying out and swooping down from the rafters. They were every imaginable color that “budgies” could be. And there were thousands of them. Living outside. Free and magnificent.

They flew several thousands of meters away from the temple. They were like a light show or living rainbow that cackled in unison as budgies in captivity sometimes do. But these beautiful birds were not on a perch in a sad, little pet shop. Their beauty took me aback as did the young man’s ability to cause them to fly on command. Or so it seemed.

There was a particular stop on a Himalayan trek that has stayed deep within me. On a gorgeous morning with a postcard-clear blue sky, I stopped on my trek to put down my pack at a stone cairn to rest. When I turned around, the full majesty of Mt. Everest rose before me. Its apex was covered in snow being blown by high mountain winds. The peak was framed on either side by clusters of multi-colored flowers from the rhododendron forests it sat behind in the distance.

“Rhododendrons?” I wondered aloud. My mind clung to an image of small tidy bushes planted by the front steps that many Canadian gardeners cultivated. But these were in no way that. These were tall, towering trees heavy with blooms in red, white, and pink. My trek through the canopy of Rhodos was more special when I realized I would not likely see such magnificent trees as these anywhere else on the planet.

Other happy places I’ve been to have been smaller and more private. Snuggling beneath a down comforter or featherbed, preferably with a hot cup of tea and milk. Sitting down in the middle of a forest propped up against a stately old moss-covered tree, absorbing the cool and the woodland fragrance. Sitting in snow, carefully shielded from the cold, and breathing in the ir that froze the hairs in my nose.

Occasionally I have also found a deep level of peace and happiness in someone’s arms. This unique comfort generic to lovers is but one of a million reasons why coupling up is attractive. Just knowing there is another living, human being breathing beside you, ready to face the day with all of its potential joy and challenges is amazing.

So today I feel myself drifting off to another happy place. The ocean off Sri Lanka where schools of brightly colored aquatic fish and marine life swam before me in an endless pageant of color and shapes. Again, that vista offered the dual comforts of peace and beauty.

I never forget that I am beyond fortunate to have these happy places to revisit. I was very fortunate to have visited them in the first place.

And I am also very happy for the chance to go back into my memories whenever I want to relive them again when I want to. Like now, for example…

Enough Already

When is enough? I have asked the question before. When do we know we have done enough in aid of what we are trying to achieve in life?

Periodically in life, it is of value to do some stock-taking. An inventory, if you will, of what we have and don’t have. Materially, emotionally, and physically. What we still want and don’t have. What’s good about our life and what has to go.

Life can be marked by patches of plenty and want. The sages out there say that. we increase our chances of getting what we want by being grateful for what we have right now. I have found that this works. Or at the very least, it can relieve the negativity of a situation we’re struggling in.

I believe most of us can live comfortably on quite a bit less than advertisers and social expectations would have us believe. Envy and greed are all too human vulnerabilities that are easily exploited.

If every comfort we seek is outside of us, we have no time to just be alone and luxuriate in our own thoughts. I have found that times of external scarcity were my greatest teachers. I was often terrified as I could not imagine my external circumstances would ever change.

And yet they did. It was true that when one door closed, another opened. It finally became obvious that I was not totally in charge of my ultimate path or destination. We can pursue and wish deeply for what we want in our lives. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

It is what we do with the bare patches in life that shape us the most.

I was a world traveler who sought out the cheapest ways of getting around. I carried only a backpack and valuables in a fanny pack or neck wallet. I was a camping buff as a young adult.

Distilling life down to its barest elements of food, water, warmth, and shelter was clarifying, in a way. It was good to be reminded how little we needed when living like that. We learned – if worse came to worse – we could chuck city trappings and survive on little more than our wits, a canteen of fresh water, and a couple of cans of beans. Or the French equivalent was a baguette, cheese, and a cheap bottle of red wine.

By living poor, I also learned a lot about grace. I once trekked in the Himalayas in Nepal. One afternoon, I went to lie down and set up camp by a small building in a village. A young girl of about 14 years old and some friends came by to watch what I was doing.

When she realized I was planning to sleep there in the open that night, she panicked. “No sleeping, no sleeping,” she said frantically while motioning across her neck with her thumb. “Man come… killing.” That night, I was happy to crawl into my sleeping bag laid out on the dirt floor of her parents’ small village hut.

The next morning I was served the most delicious eggs I ever had that had been cooked in a black bottom pan over an open fire pit in the middle of the hut. That memory has stayed with me. It is a story of how my life may have been saved out of the blue by a caring little girl. The other lesson I came away with was how rich their life seemed to be in one of the poorest places on earth.

I am currently stock-taking. As we prepare to move to a new house, I look around this house to see what needs to go with us to the new one. There is so much that will be left behind. Deliberately.

It feels odd to be at the place where we are ready to offload the possessions we have spent a lifetime accumulating. It does seem that is the way it goes. A less cluttered house – we hope – will allow for more living and creating. Me with my words and my husband at his easel.

I admire and I’m a little envious of those sage souls who know from very early on what they want to be and how they will live their life. It is a special kind of blessing. My life has been more of a trial-and-error experience. It has led me down various side roads and byways. It took many years of experiments to arrive at a place where life works for us.

Perhaps, put differently, we learn to be at peace with what is and accept what we have with gratitude and grace. I don’t waste too much time these days unpacking the hows and whys of the journey I took to get here. I feel profoundly lucky that I did.