I’ve meant to write this for some time, but I’ve continually put it off. It is, first and foremost, a story, but it is a story with a deeper message that I think can be valuable to others.
I have always gotten along well with people. In grade school, I was something of a chameleon at times, and it was extremely rare for me to have enemies of any kind. In fact, I remember going to my high school homing-coming football game the year after I graduated, and the whole trumpet section stood up to greet me when I went to visit them during the 3rd quarter.
But getting along with people, or even being celebrated by them, is not the same as being good friends with them – knowing them well. I was fortunate enough to have a small core of good friends throughout highschool, whom I often describe as “damn reasonable”, and I will always be thankful for them, but it has never been lost on me that group dynamics can be complicated, and turning up and feeling comfortable is not the same as turning up and feeling deeply known and accepted.
My closest friends have always been greatly different from me, which is funny, since the cultural stereotype is that you should make friends with those who are very similar to you. To be fair, I think you do need some commonality, but for my friends this has usually been A) the love language of quality time, B) at least one hobby or interest that we share, and C) a dedication to continuing the friendship. It dawned on me some time ago that community will never look exactly how I want it to look, simply because if it did, it would be tyranny, not community. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should force yourself into a group you don’t connect with, but there is no such thing as a perfect community (“And it’s a little less perfect now that you’re in it!” one pastor used to joke).
I want to talk briefly about the larger outdoor community in Colorado. I confess that I’ve been wrong about something critical, and it only dawned on me this past Spring.
I’ve told the story before, but my parents never taught me how to hike, or camp, or do much of anything outdoors except fish, and I was never particularly good at that. I’ve never been athletic or competitive, and except for a few rare periods of time, I’ve almost always been carrying an embarrassing 20-30 extra pounds. When I finally did discover hiking, it really changed my life, but I never went crazy over it. It just became something I was fascinated by, something I looked forward to, even if I was too scared to drive deep into the mountains at times, even if those early summers took an inordinate amount of dedication to get out to do anything.
I always found the outdoor “community” in Colorado to be very uninviting. Sometimes there were the meat-heads, sometimes the trail-heads; peakbaggers, racers, enthusiasts, etc. At least as concerns hiking, the 14ers seem to dominate the discussion. I remember going with a group from my college to hike Grays and Torreys, but the trailhead was closed, so a small group of us did Bierstadt, while everyone else did another one, because they had “already done Bierstadt”. That always rubbed me the wrong way. Who cares? Why does that matter? Many years later, as I set out for Chasm lake in late morning, a hiker returning from Longs peak asked me how close we were to the parking lot. Close, I said, and he scoffed and said something I can’t remember precisely now. It wasn’t until later that I realized he thought I was heading up Long’s, too, which honestly would have been a bad idea so late in the morning. I got pretty angry when it clicked. The obsession with 14ers is so great, people just assume that’s the only thing you’re out there for. (Best I didn’t understand what he was saying at first, as there’s a decent chance I would have said something quite nasty in response)
Of course, being overweight and under-trained doesn’t help, either. I remember coming back down Quandary, all of my friends having left me behind, and feeling so worthless, weak, and unwanted, that I just melted into a pool of tears on the rocks. You’d be right to think, “Hey, good for you, though! You got to the top and were heading back down!”, but it didn’t feel that way; it felt awful. Even in much better shape, I have always been a slow hiker. Years later I got 3 friends to hike my favorite valley. Two rushed forward, while one stayed behind with me. The one who stayed behind is a good friend to this day, while the others I really haven’t bothered to stay in touch with.
This goes a long way toward tarnishing the appeal of things like 14ers. I read a book called “Colorado 14er Disasters” that explains how summit fever gets people killed, and how the obsession with the “list” has caused many problems on the trails. It was only natural that I fell into a pattern of scorning this list. Just a bunch of hyper-competitive yahoos trying to tick notches in their hiking belts. I mean, sure, I knew good people who liked them a lot, but in general, it was just a silly annoyance. …right?
I think I always knew I was wrong about this. You don’t need a degree in Psychology to know that partly I was just jealous. This was the first revelation. But not jealous in the way you might think. I honestly didn’t care about the “list”, but I did care about feeling accepted. The more 14ers you hiked, the more legit you were in the eyes of the community, and the more praise people heaped on you for being “adventurous”. I wanted that acceptance, very deeply. But how do you get that when you don’t care about these things that others care so much about? So my narrative shifted: really, it was just the unoriginality of following somebody else’s list that bothered me. Right? Following somebody else’s list had nothing to do with beauty or preference, or discovery, just crank out of those pre-defined trails. So lame. …right?
But I think I always knew I was wrong about this, too. Because doing your own thing is hard. Finding trails? Deciding what to do? Prioritizing your options? Seeing what is fun and what isn’t? That’s hard, time consuming, and not generally conducive to going and getting things done. Sometimes having a list is really, really nice. And that was when the truth dawned on me: “You wanted to fit in, but you didn’t, and that really hurt.”
….Yeah. It really did hurt.
I also realized that this could even partly be traced back to people I knew, incidents in which it felt like people who represented the community really slighted me. Whether they meant to or not wasn’t really the concern, there was simply an importance in recognizing that I felt that way, and this was having a deep affect on me, combined with all the years of frustration.
In fact, I was part of this online hiking group, in which one day somebody planned an event and explicitly labelled it, “Fit people only!!” I laughed out loud. “Yeah, that’s the spirit, that’s what this community is all about” something said inside of me. In reality, though, it totally made sense – if you want to do advanced hiking or mountaineering, you simply can’t have unprepared people tagging along just to be social. It really does make sense. But it was almost as if the secret of the community had been spilled out: “we do not accept you unless you are sold-out and insane about hiking”.
But even if that were true, that’s not necessarily wrong. Plenty of people there had been friendly to me, but sometimes you just don’t fit in, and that’s life. It hurts, and it sucks, but that’s just how it is. Like sure, I’m good at being a chameleon because I’m a generally friendly person who gets along easily with others, but sometimes you just aren’t going to fit in, and it doesn’t do you any good to hold that as bitterness in your heart.
Sometimes, you just don’t fit in.
Just like Missions. I wasn’t constantly going on short term missions trips, so a lot of people I knew and respected in Missions simply ignored the fact that I cared.
Just like…a lot of things. Sometimes, you just don’t fit in.
And as for identity, I spent my 20s chasing a projection for myself, whether it was a scholar in various fields, some sort of business-as-missions thing, particular technologies (once I started working), history, etc., etc., anything, anything to avoid the cold nothingness. But I was mistaken in thinking an identity would hide me from deeper fears. All of this was vanity.
More than any other kind of hiking, I like to wander deep up remote valleys, where tree line ends, and find strange things. Planks of wood. Markers. Ditches of orange glass and cans, fragments of glass and porcelain. I am never so alive as when I’m exploring old and forgotten ruins. And the temptation then was to make this my identity, too, to become an expert on these old artifacts, but that too was vanity, and I started letting go. I would go out and find my peace and enjoy life, and it was like cool rain on a warm summer day.
None of this is against those who have a strong external identity, or those who have an identity at all, only God has constantly been teaching me that these identities are often fickle, deceptive, and/or unnecessary. None of my true friends have ever been impressed by the masks I’ve worn, so I see the world very differently than I did 10 years ago. Mostly, I realize that there are things in life far more important than these identities, and I have a greater appreciation for community when it arises spontaneously, and outside of our expectations. Heck, just a week or two ago, somebody I barely know in another state gave me a tour of a ski valley in the place I’ll likely be moving, so praise God for the community that he can pull together beyond our knowing!