You can plan your day down to the last detail—wake-up time, pace, weather window, snack breaks—and the mountain will still do what it wants.
It took me a few treks to stop taking that personally.
In the beginning, I’d get thrown off by the smallest shift—rain an hour early, energy dips that didn’t match my timing, trails that looked nothing like the ones I’d studied. I thought if I just prepared harder, I could predict the experience. Make it neat. Keep it under control.
But the mountains aren’t interested in my checklists. They’re not watching how many hours I trained or how many almonds I packed. They’re not cruel. Just indifferent.
And weirdly, that’s become the part I trust the most.
Something changes when you stop trying to control the terrain and start responding to it. You notice more. You adjust faster. You stop wasting energy resisting what’s already true.
Plans are helpful until they get in the way. The real skill—the one I’ve had to build trek after trek—is flexibility. Not in some philosophical way. In the most practical, hour-to-hour kind of way.
You adapt, or you get stuck. You stay present, or you fall behind. You let go of how it was supposed to go, and tune into what’s actually happening under your feet.
The mountain doesn’t bend for you. You learn to move with it.
And honestly, life makes more sense that way too.
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