Inner adventures

The risk of not risking is boredom

In our lives the thing we fear most is the uncertainty. Fear itself can be directly translated to that which is certain and in a plain way we can say that we fear being scared.
Fear have brought society to worship safety more than anything to a point where the general direction of humanity is to “live to survive” instead of “living for paying”.

9 ramp
Mallroy on Stortinden, Lyngen, Norway

This is leaving us with a huge problem. If we are able to obtain the perfectly safe world that society is moving towards, what will then the excitement of being alive be?
The reasons we play games is the excitement of uncertainty. When we, in the midst of a game, can see who the winner is going to be, then the thrill of the game, for this round, is terminated. Only the memory of excitement together with the prevision of delight in case of a possible return of the game remains.
One could of course ass well see the play of life as a dance and some would say that in dancing we don’t need to risk anything. Yes, it might not be the risk of loosing like in other games, but we still need to play the beautiful art of improvisation. And when improvising we are leaning in, thrusting, the uncertainty of this moment, and letting that which comes out from it be demonstrated as art.
The point is that, in any game worth playing, there need to be a certain mix of skill and uncertainty.
If we, by training, can obtain a level of skill that makes the outcome certain we have taken away the motivator behind playing, and boredom steps in through the door.

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High up on the Orient Express, Denali, Alaska

Swedish alpine ski legend, Ingemar Stenmark were once heard saying: “the more I train, the more luck I seem to have”. He was playing by these rules, but anyone that has been a player, athlete or spectator of any sport or drama will remember the excitement and the feeling of freshness of life, the apparent meaning of this moment and the oblivion of time more from a game that was either won or lost by a tiny margin than a game with a grand margin.
Games that are way over our heads, where we have no chance what so ever to win, they will never be an exiting play either.
Of course I’m not advocating a dangerous society. But I do want to encourage the idea of people going out in nature or life in general and play with the uncertainty that is one of the cornerstones that a joyful life is built upon. There have to be a responsibility following the experienced freedom of playing with life, and that should be to not endanger others in our pursuit of glimpses of happiness.
Other than that, lets go out there, play, and chase even the tiniest fractions of boredom away from our doors of perception.

Ungraspable smoke – Or the girl named Meaning living in a world called Beauty

In a world of shadows I try to fetch something hard and tangible – something that will not move like smoke in the wind from my hand.
Life is a search for that which will stay, a lofty search for permanence some would say. One part of me have already lost the faith I though I had in grasping the secrets of life. How could we seize something we, ourselves, define as ungraspable?
Many are seeking for happiness, but have you ever heard anyone being able to truly put in to words what he´s searching for? Can it be that we are in love with the idea of finding that which cannot be found, and there for, if we find it – we will be touching the sublime?
How many layers of the onion do we have to peel of before we can see that there is no center of material truth? And if we are turning the world upside-down, well, then there is no space, no no-thing either.
Words and worlds fall a part in the same way, because in the end, they are but the same; ideas with value put upon each other in a wonderful peace of art.
What would the meaning of it all be, if not to exist in its own way only because that is the dance of every-thing and no-thing, space and no-space.
Shadows are dancing on the roofs tonight and smoke is falling from the sky like rain. The water is creeping up along the walls, because it is aiming for the stars. The moon is shining and giving light to a scene or characters that have run out of play. The play is used up, you see, and what composition can the universe serve up with then?
Empty hearts are beating of-rhythm because of-beat is the radest we can imagine of anything. No, is the other side of yes.
So will we find a world in the end built up out of one´s and zero´s like a giant matrix of black and white? Grey, you know, can be a mixture of black and white dots seen from a distance.

beach

I´m back by the shore, under the moon with the stars somewhere high up above the clouds and I can hear the water breathing and hitting firmer ground. My body is pulsating and my feelings have power. I know nothing matters more than the value you choose to give it. But if we have that power, to give value, why not pour that everywhere we find beauty.
I’m doing my best to follow my thoughts and dreams to their ends, but then what? What is there behind the end? Some imagine a great treasure on the other side of a magical door by a mystical sea.
But what will I do with this treasure? Can it buy me anything I really don´t have right now?
Being brought up in the western world I have the means to create the funds to buy any thing or experience I can imagine I would want. A treasure of gold might entertain for a while, but then what?
Will there be sensual pleasures on the other side as some kind of reward? In my wildest fantasies I cannot imagine any sensation that would satisfy me more or differently than the ones I can experience in this reality. Then again, of course there is a risk I´m having a lack of imagination.
Or shall I be running for the reward of nothingness? Well, the next step from having is to not have, and in that case it´s where I´m going when I die anyways. Why should I either desire or not desire something that will be and when it becomes it will not be there, nor my feelings of craving, fear, pain or love. As you see, taking words to their endings always lead to the absurd.
However I turn my world in my palm I don’t see a reason why I should be afraid, nor do I see any reason why not to live this life in the most adventurous and wild way possible. Wild for me can be to party, train harder than ever, do the ski of my life, love the girl of my life as much as it can be sitting on a hard cushion in a monastery for ten years. None of these alternatives are square to me as long as there lays an inner desire behind them all.
The lowest benchmark I can imagine is living in a way that you don´t want to live. But that is not because I feel it´s worse than any of the above mentioned. It´s simply not a beautiful story to tell, and in that sense there is a girl named Meaning living in a world called Beauty.
Beauty held still in a clenched hand will not remain beautiful at a second glance. Permanence might be the grand illusion we all aim for but that no one would really want to have. Change is the bliss we all fight and are afraid of. So instead of running for the eternal rewards that we don´t want in the first place, lets enjoy the changing beauty of the dance that is happening around us. The sublime is already here, because we will never be able to explain anything of importance.
The world is changing back to its normal ways. Smoke is rising and the water dropping from the roofs in the small village. The sun is shining somewhere high above the grey clouds of this ordinary new day and everyone around is living their everyday games. It´s time to go out and touch the beauty of the ticking time and the change that´s slowly creeping upon this earth.

The end?

When as a boy I read the stories of Swedish climber Göran Kropp and his adventures (including riding a bike from Sweden to Nepal and then climbing the highest mountain in the world) I was stunned.

I read about his adventures and from then on I started sleeping many nights in my sleeping bag on the side of my bed on the floor with the window open. The adventure was on and I could not see any other way to live my life.

Back then I was stuck in the fully conceptualized way of thinking where I drew a line between myself and the others – the people who realized their dreams. My grand intent was, luckily, to smash all walls and limits I could possibly find – but still I drew a line in between them, the people who, in my world were free, and myself. I think I gave them mystical powers of strength as well as physical, mental and economical standards.

Fifteen years later I know from my own experience that the people I used to look up to where not really stronger than anyone else – they had just been following their dreams.

Where to?

Before I would have said the end, but nowadays the end mean something completely different to me and now I’m satisfied saying that they have just taken their dreams a little bit further than the normal, met their fear a little bit more than the average person.

The end means something completely different to me now. I have so many of my friends who have taken their quests to the end that society calls death, that I sometimes have a hard time appreciating the value of “taking something to its end” and to give it the right proportions.

I’m not even sure I believe in the normal concepts of life and death any more. What’s what, and which is which, and which is that? I have visited many worlds and from some vantage points, what we keep as things important and serious just seem like a game of sticks and stones between kids.

What society view as sane is only accustomization to what’s widely seen as the normal. And with “the normal” means only having the normal fears, normal views of reality, normal limitations and so on of any ordinary person who have experienced something normal in life.

Society, though, is slowly changing its vantage point to the one of the rebels of its own self. The rebels are never acknowledged in their own time (at least not in their own youth, with a few exceptions) but it’s always their breakthroughs in consciousness that tomorrows reality will be built upon.

So what are we going to do with the gems of truth we find among the ice, rock and snow on the mountains? What are we going to do with the small satoris we experience on our everyday adventures? What can we do?

What can we do if not just enjoy them and share them with our friends? From one point of view they are only childish escapistic and romantic games we play. From the other end of the scale they are the very reason we are alive, the great meaning to life.

So what’s next in line? What are the worthy adventures to follow to their ends? And what is really the end – can we ever get there – to the end?

For me, the next thing in line is to try to normalize a life not normal. I don’t mean that I need to normalize it to someone else’s standards, but I need to do it for my self. I need to find a platform on where I can live, love and grow in harmony with my self, my family and friends. I have met death, and I have come back and I have also met life and come back from that. Where can I take these extremes on the scale (as we know it) and find coherence? Where can I out of this coherence still get the depth in a life built of opposites?

Yes, I hear my own thought threads; every question leads to another question, but maybe, sometimes, questions are the moving answers that we are searching for. They are alive, where I imagine the final answer would be a dead one – its killing the feast, it takes the curtains away.

The worthy adventures of the future will be the ones that invite uncertainty to the table together with beauty and esthetics on the other side. And at the other end of the table there have to sit an unanswered question. This is how I imagine a good adventure.

It have to be uncertain, because for me, things that are static are not alive and if an adventure is certain (success, risk, reward etc.) it can be done purely in ones mind – it would not be worth using the playground of this world to expand our consciousness and go out in it and play.

It has to have beauty and be esthetic because that, I think, is one of the secrets to life. I’m not just say that it just has to be a beautiful mountain, river, wilderness, wall or something you can grip. It can also be beautiful in its own execution, like alpine style ascents of big mountain faces are, in my mind, some of the most beautiful things that exist on this earth.

A good adventure also has to have an unanswered question because that, when pure, is the engine of the whole feat. The adventure has to answer the questions to the likes of: where I brave enough? Did I have enough heart? Or skill, or strength, or experience? Or just some other questions that could be found deep within!

Then comes the question what the end is? In normal mountain adventures the goal and the end is usually the same thing. We are going to climb this or that route on this or that mountain and if we are succeeding in the objective, we did it in clean means and if everyone is back safely its usually taking this particular adventure to its end. But then, the mountain people, or maybe it’s a human thing, however, we seem to have a passion for doing what we do in general; for example climbing mountains. And taking this passion to its end is much harder to define, but maybe my friends that have perished, perhaps that’s what they did?

I can’t though, avoid the question what “the end” really means.

It’s the death of something, that’s pretty clear. Even though the word “death” really means the ending of a biological organism, I feel like we can use it as, for example, the death of a dream, death of a vision and so on – An ending to something.

I think it’s impossible to not be a mystic when it comes to talk about any important question. Mysticism, really meaning going beyond words in to one’s own personal experience.

But how can we experience something that will be the end of ourselves and subsequently our own experience? Using words, either everything will stop and we will not experience anything – or the experience will continue and we will experience more…

For anyone with an assemblage point not totally stuck in the “normal” way of thinking there is, to say the least, hope for the future. But that’s not where this thread of thought is going at this moment.

It’s going to continue on the “going to the end” and “what the end is” and its not going to uphold itself with what’s behind the curtains.

For me, to take something to its end is to live every aspect of it fully, whatever that might be. It does not have to do at all with biological death. If one is interested in skiing, well then ski till you don’t want to ski any more. Be smart, don’t get injured, sick or kill your self while doing it. Back of when needed, because “perseverance is favorable” as the old proverb, states. But still ski, till you break on through to the other side!

The same goes with food, climbing, career, love or anything else, where living it through is the only way to take it to its “end”.

So this is where I am right now. In some ways I feel like I have lived my own dream of skiing, as it where, through, and now its time for the next step. How am I to live the middle age skiers life (a life of a skier is definitely counted differently than a normal life) where many of my old powerful dreams of the past are lived through, where I need to preserve and renew what’s left of my body, where most of the friends of old have quit or are gone and when motivation and enthusiasm does not come as easily.

Well, then its time for new adventures! Its time to use the knowledge and experience gained by time to realize the biggest of dreams and even the dreams I didn’t dare to dream before. Its time to take a step back on some places where I have nothing to gain but still take two steps forward where my dreams and ambitions are pointing, saying; “live this life, live this chance, live what’s here because here and now is the only thing that is”. What the consequences of this dream will be, I don’t know, but what ever happen – if I don’t follow it through it will come with regret and what would be the reason to dream at all, if I don’t follow these magical dreams through”?

Through, to the other side of that wall or that curtain, through, to the next adventure to come. Because if I don’t want to learn and live this adventure to its end, it will repeat itself till I’m happy to learn. But, by then, the risk is that the adventure that was supposed to be magic will just be executed in routine – its opposite.

Home

Winter white trees in a landscape of black and white in a place called home. Only the warmth shining from a house here and there is lighting up the countryside. This is a world without shadows. There are only contrasts from what’s here and there, nothing more, nothing less.

It’s a place born out of stillness, and some how it feels like it never started moving. The grey cluds are holding the villages and the forest in a firm grip to protect the creatures from the sun that barely manage to climb the horizon.
When I breathe I get a mild sensation in my nostrils of sticky cold from the lowlands blended with moisture from the ocean.  It reminds me of when I was a kid.
Yes, this is my roots, and I can sense the wave of memories wanting to overtake me behind every corner. But I’m trying to be strong; I don’t want to plunge in to the stream of remembrance and thought. It is here that I want to be, in this moment, and I want to enjoy the sensations of now, because they will pass sooner than later. Time is always short.
In between every grand adventure life takes me on, I want to land, it only for a day – where the seed of all dreams where planted.
I want to dive in to the familiar feelings and grasp the sensation of belonging to something. And even though external adventures are almost practically impossible in this choked winter landscape, that for me is standing still – I immerse myself in to an inner journey tasting of calm, distress and joy, half eaten by the rats and mice of time.
But I have to be fair to this place. In the greyness of tediousness my dreams galloped in the opposite direction and lifted me, took me away. In a world that meant nothing to me as a child I created my own little utopia and saved up the energy, just like a little boy saving up for his first bike, to someday fly to where I belonged.
Nowadays I thrive when I’m back home. I lean in to the past and I give a loving smile to that boy I once knew. I’m kind of proud of him.
Now though, everything has changed. What was once a prison leading to dreams of escape is now only a winter landscape dressed in grey.  When it doesn’t try to hold me back, I can see the beauty of it all and the meaning other people find in it.
I can see the beauty in a landscape of black and white, with warmth and love shining from houses in the cold; the beauty of the memories from the past or from the low clouds giving the countryside a hug, somehow trying to substitute the sun.
Contrast, cold, feelings of emptiness, memories once again trying to sneak in and a prison wall with marks from my escape. The old feelings have vanished. What’s left is only what I once called home.

Digging deep

Deep in the darkness beyond that which is known lies the secrets nowhere else to be seen. In the silence behind what can be heard lies the answers we have been searching for for so long. When we walk past the line that indicate our own comfort zone we will learn something new about ourselves.

Its most often not a truth that can be told in fancy words, but still in a comforting way we will grow as wise human beings. Going beyond that which is known means we will have to face our fears because the unknown implies fear. But our human experience will also grow, and that is what i think everyone is secretly searching for.

Of course, the freedom and the painless state is in a world of no boundaries – of no concepts. But as this is a place most beings don’t even understand; why not start with stretching the boundaries we do know. Why not fight and/or love an opponent we do know?

Winning by this society’s standards implies, of course, loosing because we would not know one if we didn’t knew the other. To really win, then, means we can’t play by the game rules of winning and losing, we can’t play the game at all.

Ascending a mountain alone in the darkness when you are more tired than you ever been before, is a stretching experience of ones mind. The fear will creep up on you and there is no where to hide. There are no virtual reality, music, friend or TV that can distract us from seeing whats there in front of us. There is nothing more than the pain, the beauty, the tiredness, the fear and the darkness surrounding you.

Of course you can turn around, but if you are someone pushing this far, you are probably also someone scared of failure as well. Maybe you have to be, to be able to push your self to places where most don’t go – and see things most men do never see.

When you in the end are done and home in safety, and the drugs of sensations have played themselves out, then when everything is still, that stillness is somehow bigger than it was before. That great living room in your head you called consciousness feels bigger than you thought you knew it was before.

This is for me the biggest reward life on the edge gives me. I can not say what its worth in this and that. But, for me, the reason we are living this life is to explore space – in a real kind of sense. You chose your own tools, then answers are always there for those who put forward the questions.

Thin air

It’s pitch dark and I just know something is wrong. A creeping panic is taking over me but I’m too tired to understand why. For a few seconds that feels like an eternity, everything is silent. With raw power that I cant control, my lungs are screaming for oxygen and eagerly suck in the cold mountain air. I roll over in my sleeping bag and kneel up to focus on my breath. I’m nauseous, my head is aching, it’s hard to breathe and I’m surrounded by darkness in the middle of the night. Maybe I should not be here, but I am. Cope with it Andreas. This night was supposed to be the summit night, but this time you have taken it a little bit to far. If you just had taken it easy today you would have been in prime shape for the summit push. But no, you went half way up the mountain and then down to the base to get that heavy bag, just for training, just to get as much in as possible. Acclimatisation works hell of a lot better when not wasted, and you knew this, didn’t you? Well, showing serious signs of AMS, the only sober thing to do is to go down first thing in the morning. We will lose this weather window, but that’s just how it is. On the other hand, after a few days rest in town, the strength will be back and even stronger than before.
Lesson learned – time at first glance wasted, at second thought well invested. That’s why I’m here, for my own inner reasons of course, but also to learn from the mountains first hand. Its just always there; the fight with the ego, the fight for success in the short-term perspective. It’s curious how the ego doesn’t seem to understand that it’s not about one battle, but about winning the war in the end – if you like to use the warrior term analogies.  

The debates and the chattering in the head continue in the dark. The pain keeps on vibrating in the silence. But there is also this inner smile observing it all, taking away most of the apparent importance. Left are only the thin air, the cold and the moist steaming from my frightened breathing.