Is Your Life Compostable?
Reflections and thoughts one week out from the Colorado Trail — from addiction and heartbreak to self-reclamation, goal surgery, and rebuilding life from the ground up.
The first week of August started off crisp and cool here in Michigan.
My mind is far off, following a pin dropped out west nearly eight months ago. The map, once a blur, now sharpens into crystal clear focus, and I am transported there: fields of pale pink and blue columbine, sharp alpine air, clouds hung low in the valley of mountainscapes.
I thought hiking in the woods for a month and a half would be a hard sell to both family and friends. What an eye-opening experience this has been: I was wrong. I have been met with a constellation of support, comradery, and occasionally, awe. I’m stuck on the latter: what’s so inspiring about a 500-mile walk?
Had I taken a moment to step outside myself, I would have realized the privilege involved in being able to do something like the Colorado Trail. And, okay yes, I worked for it — it being the hike, which I have not even started yet, and thus feel awkward celebrating the notion of having done or being able to complete because… well, who really knows what’s going to happen out there? Still, there were more than a few things in the way; not just of this trail, but of everything I’d been trying to move toward. My life had become an overgrown path which required serious bushwhacking.
Dr. Heights Performs Goal Surgery
Financially, physically, professionally, emotionally, mentally, and just about every other -ally, I have prepared for the handful of moments that take place a week from now. I don’t feel ready, which is to be expected. I’m never really “ready” for what’s next, I’m just learning more and more that I need to throw myself into it anyway.
What’s more is the way the fog cleared when I removed the “placebo” goals from the drawing board (husband, mortgage, kids?) and started replacing them with more genuine, topical goals I’d been spinning up in my dreams (thru-hiking, sailing, island life?). What was once a lazy, sorry, no-good sack of sad has now become a high-contrast vision of synchronized movements, all working in chorus to get to the next chapter. But, what served as the catalyst for this slightly manic and altogether not uncommon migration towards the social fray?
Some guy cheated on me, obviously. I wish I were kidding. That’s only a fraction of the whole story, though. A gap this wide (from societal standards to where I stand and the route I’ve chosen) takes a while to culminate.
And I wouldn’t say I’m healed, but I do have a headlamp and a plan.
Life on Autopilot, Without a Plot
Obviously I didn’t just wake up one day and think, “I’m going to completely upheave my life and start back from ground zero, because I’m not a fan of what’s being built. Also this foundation sucks, we should tear that out too.” It was far more gradual. A snail’s pace, really. When the COVID pandemic hit, I was a bartender out of work with a drinking problem, a sober fiancé, and a terrible spending habit (living paycheck to paycheck and beyond), willfully ignorant of anything happening outside my own bubble. I fell far outside of my own grace in that chapter, and it showed.