Nothing Higher to Find

There's a spot above the village where the ridge falls away on three sides at once. The valley drops in the kind of scale that is supposed to make ranking irrelevant: forest, then terraced fields, then a river you can hear before you can see it, then hills doing the same thing again in miniature on the far side. For years I couldn't stand there without doing something faintly ridiculous in my head. I ranked it. Against the view from a col two valleys over. Against a photograph a friend had sent from somewhere further north. Against a spot slightly higher up the same ridge that I hadn't yet been fit enough to reach. I would arrive at something genuinely spectacular and spend the first several minutes deciding how it placed.

I don't do that anymore, mostly, and getting to the point where I stopped took longer than any climb I've made. The hike itself was never hard. It was the habit underneath the hike that took years to walk off, the reflex to treat a good view the way you'd treat a competitor: something to be measured, beaten, or quietly filed under not quite good enough yet.

Robert Pirsig wrote something once about mountaintops that has stayed with me longer than most books survive a single reading. His point, more or less, was that the stillness people go looking for at altitude was never waiting up there for them. You carry it up yourself, or you arrive without it. I read that sentence a decade before I understood it, which is probably the ordinary way people receive most things worth understanding.

What the ranking habit actually cost me wasn't enjoyment. It was attention. Every minute spent wondering whether this ridge beat that one was a minute not spent looking at the ridge I was standing on. I have lost count of the good views I walked away from a little disappointed, not because anything was wrong with them, but because I had already decided, somewhere on the way up, that something better probably existed and I simply hadn't found it yet. That is a strange kind of poverty to carry into a place this rich.

It occurs to me now that I did this with more than views, once. Whole towns and countries got measured the same way, weighed against the next one before I had properly finished with the last, until at some point I stopped moving and let a single valley be enough.

I am still ambitious about the climbing itself, and I chase harder routes and higher passes than I probably need to. But I have learned to keep that appetite separate from the quiet ten minutes I actually spend once I arrive somewhere. The climb is allowed to stay competitive. The looking is not. One is a sport. The other, if you let it be, is a form of attention that has nothing left to prove to anyone, least of all yourself.

These days, when I reach that spot above the village, I try to do the one thing that used to be hardest there. Nothing. No comparing, no filing it against the last good view or the next one. Just the ridge, falling away on three sides, exactly as good as it already is.