You and your mountatin

You and your mountain

J. Urbina

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A really ironic thing about life is that its purpose, for a really vast majority of people, is to find this same purpose.

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As I’m writing this, issues like anxiety and depression are exponentially increasing in the younger generations, with this last one slowly threatening to be THE disease that humanity will need to face in the future.

I, personally, also had a depressive period during the COVID-19 quarantine because I didn’t know where my own life was going, I didn’t have any goals or things to pursue, and without any motivation, I thought I was just worthless.

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However, after I played a video game called Celeste, in which you control a girl with depression to climb a mountain, I understood a lot of things.

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Our lives can be represented as a mountain, a really high, cold and dangerous mountain that we need to climb to reach goals, whether they are getting good grades in school, finishing a personal project or just getting out of a difficult time, and not only we have to deal with the physical obstacles of the mountain, we also need to deal with the obstacles that our own brain is creating to stop us from reaching the summit.

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The world of tomorrow seems scary, because it is; but, as opposed to the general thought, and even if it looks cruel, time doesn’t heal, not on its own.

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Sometimes, you will have a little slip that will only take you to stand again to keep climbing the mountain, and sometimes, you will fall hundreds of miles down, to maybe even lower than where you started at the beginning of your journey. At this moment, you will surely want to give up, to surrender to the cold of the mountain and stop going forward, but even if this seems like an easier way out of this horrible situation, you have to keep moving. Why? Because that’s everything we got.

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And that’s where the beauty of life is, we don’t have a purpose when we born, we as humans create our own purpose, and that’s incredible, because that means that we are watching our reality as more than just simple survival, with this thought, our race has created paintings, music, competitive sports, literature, education, entertainment, and a large etc.

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Nature isn’t only resistant to changes; it is also resilient, which is the capacity to recover even if it goes through a disturbance in its natural state. We as humans need to be more resilient than resistant because, like it or not, there will always be changes in our lives, moving to another school, stop seeing close friends frequently, the death of a loved one, these are all examples of the millions of changes that the life of a person can have as he grows up, changes that will transform his reality, for good or for bad, but this capacity of recovering from the bad things can help us learn something, even as minimal that this teach could be.

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And the fact that we created our society and everything that was listed before is amusing, because it means that we have the capacity to overcome all these changes to continue doing what we are passionate about

You won’t go anywhere if you don’t go yourself, that’s the reality of life, and there are really few easy shortcuts that talking with sincerity, only the most privileged people have. But even though we should be resilient, we have to be open to changes, to adapt to our situation, and if we know that our mountain is just too much for us, we jump to another one, but never stop climbing.

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You surely have heard this message thousands of times already, but I’m giving it again: Never give up, because I’m sure you agree with this message, but you don’t know how to keep climbing your own mountain. But I have to tell you this, even if it’s hard, this question can only be answered by yourself. The only thing that I can do for you is ask you these other questions: What do you really enjoy doing? Where do you see yourself in the future? Who do you want to be?

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This questions will break down in other several ones, but these are primordial to start understanding ourselves in a deep level, I know it from first hand because I asked me these same questions when I had my depressive period, and even if they didn’t eliminate my depression, it was a first step that I needed to do because as I said, time won’t erase anything, only your actions can do it.

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At the end of the day, we are all climbing our own mountains, dealing with the obstacles, and trying to reach for the summit every day, and because of that, we are all brave. So, as my final question, I wanted to ask you:

Are YOU ready to keep climbing your mountain?