Welcome to Life in the Highlands, your faraway travel destination of the blog kind.
Because life is a hike: trudging uphill leaves us gasping for breath, going downhill works muscles we didn’t know we had, and then there’s the blisters, ticks, poison ivy, sunburns, hypothermia, and the occasional skunk attack we have to deal with.
But we’re led to believe that it will all be worth it once we reach the summit. The view, we’ve been told, is spectacular. Even if we do only see it for five minutes before we have to plod back towards home.
And once we have children, get them in school, send them to college, lose 20 pounds, find a better job, retire, etc., etc., etc., we’ll have reached what seems like the top of our mountain, and life will finally be perfect, if only for five minutes until it changes again and we have yet another mountain to climb.
My goal, my purpose, my quest is not to wait for the final destination, but to learn how to enjoy the journey now. To drink deeply of the mountain air, breathe the brilliant hues of the wildflowers, and marvel in the miracle of the spider web. To learn how to remove ticks and avoid poisonous plants, to find the secret recipe for removing skunk stink, and then to pass that knowledge along.
Because, unfortunately, kids go to school and grow up and leave home soon enough. And one day, we’ll all retire. But I want to know how to live better, more fully, more NOW. And treat every day, every place, and every person as the pinnacle.
So put on your metaphorical hiking boots and join me. Because we don’t have to reach the summit of the mountain to be happy, we just have to be living Life in the Highlands.
