calls "individuation".  I think that the goal of life is to gain true self-knowledge, and to fully become the person you were meant to be.  Most people go through life without ever truly and fully understanding themselves.

Mountain climbing is a path to true self-knowledge, the kind of true self-knowledge that we cannot get from an ordinary kind of day-to-day existence.  I'm sure it is not the only path, but I know from personal experience that it is a path that works.  

Stacy Allison, the first American woman to climb Everest, put it well when she said "There are no facades in the mountains.  In the mountains, you come face to face with yourself".  It's like peeling off the layers of an onion and finding out what's really inside.  For many people, the prospect of doing this seems daunting, because they are worried about what they will find inside.  But for many, many people who I have led on climbs, it has been a very positive and life-changing experience, because they have liked what they found inside.
These women and men have come back to me years later after the climb to tell me that this happened with them.

Life at its best is a journey toward Jungian "individuation".



-- Modified on 10/4/2004 7:49:36 PM