How to Find Balance on the Trail and In Life
Last Thursday, Ajax and I started up the Old Si trail around 6:30 a.m. via the Little Si trailhead. I’d received some uplifting health news the day before, and I wanted to challenge myself beyond Squak, Cougar, and Tiger Mountains. This week, I explore how to find balance on the trail and in life against the backdrop of photos from the Old Si trail.
The Ascent: Find Balance One Step at a Time
The Old Si trail meanders through the Boulder Garden Loop before continuing steeply toward Si’s summit. The trail intersects with the “new” trail in two spots. It helps to pay attention to make sure you’re on the right path.
During the hike, two things stood out:
- The absence of people: Very few people were hiking the Old Si trail. It was a beautiful midweek morning in April. Mt. Si is one of the most popular hikes near Seattle. Except for eight hikers going up as we descended, we had the upper mountain completely to ourselves.
- The unrelenting steepness: Old Si has exposed root-filled sections and is steeper than I remember from the last time I hiked it a few years ago. It’s likely why people choose the longer, more gently graded, and newer Mt. Si route. Hikers who enjoy the steep old trail on Mailbox, or the Cable/Section trails on Tiger Mountain, would love it.
Drawing Parallels To Life
After forty-some years of hiking, I implicitly trust my bodily-kinesthetic and natural-environmental superpowers. (Identify your superpowers here.) Whenever the trail gets steep, I know to slow down, take a quick break if I need one, and have alternative plans ready in case anything goes wrong. Sometimes I even speed up to get a challenging part behind me.
When I am alone, which is almost always my goal, I trust my body, my dog Ajax, my physical preparation, and four decades of wilderness experience. The mountains are my happy place.
However, when I look at challenges in my life, I lack the same confidence. Recently my daily “steep ascents” have included: A new health diagnosis in January (jagged boulders). Subsequent changes to my diet and training (rooty section). Updating and launching two websites (a cliff). Scrambling to find trusted pet care right before a trip (mud). The logistics of starting a second business and finding new clients (another sheer cliff). Completing coaching hours for a national credential (thick thorny brush). Maintaining house chores and pet care duties while my husband coaches throws in the afternoons (slick pebbles). The list sometimes feels endless.
What Are Your Obstacles?
Pause for a moment to think about the obstacles in your path. What challenges are you facing? How do you face them? Do you avoid tasks or charge forward? Maybe you pause and approach with caution or race in the opposite direction. Or perhaps you ignore them and hope they’ll disappear. How might you face them that would be more loving toward yourself and productive?
On the trail, I confidently take the next step forward. In life, however, I sometimes become a deer in the headlights or an ostrich burying my head in the sand, neither of which is helpful. Such fight, flight, or freeze responses bring me to a halt until I find a way past feelings of overwhelm.
Here’s the tricky thing: Whenever I challenge myself to grow and try new things, as I’ve been doing since starting this blog in July 2021, I’m constantly exploring an ever-expanding world I no longer — or don’t yet — know. The trail seems to shift under my feet like quicksand. Day-to-day life is not predictable. Injuries, illnesses, job challenges, relationship issues — all these things place us in the middle of an overgrown path we’ve never traveled before.
Identify Your Superpowers
So why do we expect that we can immediately solve our problems in such changing times? I’m trying to trust my innate wisdom and guidance like I already do experiences on the trail. Both require faith, endurance, and resilience. I’m also focusing on my superpowers — bodily-kinesthetic, natural-environmental, verbal-linguistic, and self-interior — rather than my shortcomings.
I help clients become aware of their skills, strengths, special talents, and superpowers so they can focus on and expand them, rather than getting down on themselves because of perceived weaknesses. If we concentrate on the negatives, we’ll always see more negatives. By concentrating on what we do WELL, we cultivate, grow, and see more good.
The Summit: I Find Balance and Moments of Clarity
At the two-hour mark, we spotted our first snow in a wooded patch right before we reached the rocky summit area. The rocks are where most people stop for a snack before heading down. Despite the steepness of the route, I felt pleased with our performance. Time to grab a snack and check out the views.
The parallel to life’s challenges is not lost on me: when we’re in the midst of struggle, we can lose sight of where we’re headed. But when we arrive at our destination and look back, we realize that although we might have been off target for much of the time, we eventually got where we wanted to go. Maybe not exactly as we expected, but the endurance and resilience we’ve built from other experiences have given us the fortitude to keep trying.
The Glory of the Views
The first view of Mt. Rainier due south stole my breath away. I grinned at the bands of lenticular clouds wisping across her flanks. I felt like calling hi to a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. A little farther along, we reached a pair of benches where I dropped my pack, got out some kibble and water for my dog Ajax, and had some cashews and a protein shake. We listened for chipmunks, jays, and other birds while admiring the views of North Bend and Puget Sound. I marveled at the miracle of having such a popular peak all to ourselves. Where is everyone, I asked myself.
A calm peace came over me as I tugged on a long-sleeved shirt and down jacket to ward off the inevitable chill of an April breeze. Hiking in the wilderness is as close to paradise as I can get. I remembered the fist-in-the-air elation I felt when I completed my 50th coaching session. Or when I received the good health news.
When our pet sitters agreed to host Ajax for a week of travel, or I landed some new clients, I felt similar satisfaction. But all the “life” examples rely on interactions with other people. With solo hiking, my results were completely under my power. Succeeding in the mountains gives me a way to find balance when I feel like things are overwhelming.
In the words of my spiritual coach, Tama Kieves, abundance invites abundance. All the work, worry, and effort of taking one step in front of another paid off. Successes in life and hiking converged. A moment of peace, well deserved.
The Descent: Return to Comfort and Familiarity
After our brief pause, we headed north toward the Mt. Teneriffe Connector trail to explore other vantage points, but the ice made it hard to find balance. I decided we’d save Teneriffe for another day and explore more in the Boulder Garden Loop. We turned back knowing the mountains would shed their snow in another month or so.
About 20 minutes past the snowy area, a group of 8 hikers under heavy packs slowly made their way up the steep trail. We stepped aside to let them pass. “You’re up here early,” one hiker said. Just the way I like it, I thought. Another woman told her companion that they’d go down the gentler Si trail so they wouldn’t have to suffer as much on the way down. She commented on how WHITE my dog was and I simply smiled, knowing how muddy he can get when the trail is covered in puddles instead of snow.
As we made our way down the trail, I listened intently for birds I might have missed on the way up. I shared things I’m grateful for with Ajax. When we reached the Boulder Garden Loop, I heard a purple finch. Having heard the same bird on our way up, I thought to myself, “I bet when I come down I’ll have to look him up again on Merlin.” Sure enough. Practice makes … better. Experience teaches us.
Trail and Life Skills In Parallel
Some of the many skills I have cultivated in the mountains — such as route finding, layering, endurance, gear management, strength, and pacing — have parallels in life. To find balance in the mountains, we need to periodize our training program to include a mixture of easy and hard outings. Likewise in life, we need to have goals we know we can achieve as well as those that stretch us. The bite-sized achievements teach us how to keep striving for those goals that are more challenging.
Finding your way in the mountains is akin to knowing where you want to go in life (i.e. having a goal) as well as how to get there. If you want new clients, for example, you need to know who your target clients are, what they want, and how best to connect with them to cultivate a strong relationship.
Endurance on the trail means you have the physical stamina to get where you want. In life’s challenges, we need to cultivate emotional resilience and fortitude to endure tough situations while also being patient, gentle, and forgiving of ourselves.
Finally, related to pacing: if we charge forward without thinking things through, we may burn ourselves out before we reach our destination. Sometimes a cautious, slower approach to our goals is better than flying Mach 2 with our hair on fire.
Please Share Your Challenges
Steep and challenging hikes provide a beautiful metaphor for the challenging portions of life’s journey. The more we can learn how to manage our stress, pace ourselves, and find balance among all our life roles, the more we can thrive during times of stress or ease. Whatever your challenge, you can overcome it.
What obstacles are you facing as you strive to find balance? Please share your comments so we can all help and learn from each other. If you would like to schedule a free 15-minute consultation with me to see how we might collaborate contact me at either Thrive Clues or Body Results.
