Without a Parachute

A Career Change, a Road Trip, and the Search for Solid Ground

To some, it probably looked like a vacation. I assure you, it was not.

The twelve days my wife and I just spent on the road camping through the Canadian Rockies was less escape, more intentional contact with the unknown. We do that sometimes: hurl ourselves into the world without a plan. Not to flee hard things, but to engage with them more fully.

On these trips, discomfort is the point.

“The danger is not uncertainty but the desire to escape it at any price. To seek guarantees is to fall into servitude.” ¹

In the early 1900s, Russian philosopher Lev Shestov’s ideas made most people uneasy. Earlier thinkers sought to subdue the world’s mysteries with reason, logic, and systems. Shestov said no. Stability is a mirage and therefore a faulty aspiration. Things always, eventually, fall apart.

Better to understand they will, and meet them well.

People say they want to feel grounded and I get that. We all long for a place where life finally feels secure. But what if, instead, we stared willingly into the unknown, holding our vulnerabilities forth, and embraced groundlessness?

Groundedness vs. groundlessness.

One seeks permanence.

The other invites transformation.

Before leaving for Canada, I became exceptionally open to transformation. I’d recently stepped away from a company I spent nearly a decade helping build. It wasn’t an impulsive decision, more a realization after months of deliberation that I was ready for a different chapter. Still, without a concrete next thing lined up, it was a leap.

“To be fully alive and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” ²

A week into the trip, our little travel trailer awash in the alpenglow of Golden, British Columbia, Lisa and I talked through our apprehensions around the next day’s adventure: a short via ferrata traverse on Kicking Horse Mountain.

It was our first time doing such a thing and I shared a lifelong fear—not so much of heights, since I regularly do trail runs that would punish a misstep with a long fall—but of air beneath my feet. Groundlessness.

We made the climb and it was marvelous, joyous. By the time we reached the ridge for an easy return hike, we were giggling like children.

The exposure never stopped being real. I just stopped needing it to go away. Somewhere on that cable, two hundred feet up with nothing below and Lisa’s hand within reach, I became less afraid of the void.

We can spend a lifetime waiting for solid ground to appear, diligently sanding the rough edges of our world, thinking stability is just ahead. Maybe the trick isn’t finding certainty, but learning to live fully and honestly without it.

Run lightly,
-mike

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Quotes:

¹ Boris Kriger, The Principle of Radical Uncertainty: Lev Shestov and the Liberation from Rational Foundations

² Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart