Mt. Adams Reflections

It took me a while to process all my thoughts from the Gonzaga University School of Leadership Studies experience on Mt. Adams this year, and perhaps a little longer to decide to share, but here is my contribution to another meaningful year:

Climbing Mt. Adams with the Gonzaga group was an amazing adventure once again. I had primed myself before the trip to focus on the idea of the role that suffering has in life by, unintentionally, reading several books along that theme. Not that I have some large traumatic issue in my background that I am working through, I'm generally blessed to have a fairly simple life. But the type of suffering that comes from striving for goals, in this case reaching the top of a mountain with a large group of people.

Life today leans toward summit experiences, we see people's success continuously, but never their struggle and the hard work required to get to the top. Losing the big picture of what effort it takes to become successful seems to shift our idea of what success really is. Changing one's perspective by venturing outdoors into a new environment, with new people, and pushing the body has a way of stripping down the unimportant and leaves us with the ability to reconnect. After many miles of walking, hot and uncomfortable, it seems like we are able to come into a better community with one another and with our internal voice as well. What lengths go to in order to reach what we would expect our resting state to be?! Bombarded by ads and the echo chamber that is social media life can easily be viewed as constant summit experiences. It is difficult to set aside the highlights or rampant materialism, strife, and conflict that we live with.?

While it may seem to be novel, to go outdoors and work hard physically and mentally to achieve some sort of enlightenment, this is far from a trend. According to our ancestors whose writing comes down to us from antiquity this is just a rediscovery:

• .From early Mesopotamia the Atrahasis & Enuma Elish (1800 BCE) written in cuneiform on clay tables we find that? humans were created for toil (mostly making beer for the gods, but toil nonetheless).
• Genesis (600-500 BCE) tells us that we are condemned to hardship
• Buddhism (500-400 BCE) informs us that the first of the noble truths is that life is suffering.

We have been informed of the importance of struggle and how it links us to our humanity for decades, centuries, and millennia.??

As I walked the trail this year my meditation revolved around Frankl’s life experience and the statement that Jean Paul Sartre makes at the end of his play “The Flies” stating that our “humanity is found on the far side of suffering”. Obviously our hardship on the trail compared to Frankl’s is hyperbolic at best. However, as Sartre has stated, Frankl was able to connect to what he called tragic optimism while enduring the upper limit of human suffering. I have begun to notice a pattern of how our struggle manifests on my visit to Mt. Adams. As the trail starts, the sharing and camaraderie is fresh, I’m excited and energetic. As the difficulty mounts and the discomfort sets in, I begin to look inside more. It always starts with self doubt. My inner voice has me focus on all the pain, the developing soreness, the unwillingness to proceed. Then about the time I hit the snowfield, I have the choice to make: stay in this dark place, or transcend. For me this takes the form of reaching out to others. Seeing where they are and tending to their worries helps me abandon my own. The final test is holding onto this attitude, as the exhaustion sets in, during the final summit push and most importantly the descent. In addition to my experience, it is also interesting to compare the teams and overall group at the beginning and end. We have had successes and disappointments together, we have sweated, toiled, laughed, and cried. How is it possible to have such a wide range of emotions in such a short time? I think it's through shared suffering. It connects us in ways that pleasure and fun cannot. It's in our human roots to bond through shared suffering, it's to be leaned into not to run away from. To retreat from hardship is to deny our ability to connect with ourselves and come into community with others. The suffering that we go through in life gives meaning and the context to our experiences.?

The remaining question is how do we bring this ability into our organizations? Speaking from my experience I’ve always been encouraged to do things like: “put the past behind you”, or “have a short memory” when it comes to failure or disappointment, or maybe “suffer in silence”. In light of the experience on the mountain this is terrible advice. Organizationally there is a need to embrace our collective failure. It pulls us together, and when acknowledged, allows us to build the resilience we need in organizations along with the emotional intelligence required to work in connection to one another. To truly transform our workplaces, we need to go further than the superficial acknowledgment of failure and hardship, but to meet our colleagues where they are in these struggles, and walk beside them while they endure. When we are the one struggling, we need others around us that we can help, helping others allows us to model successful behavior for others and ourselves.

In the timeless words of Dostoevsky's “the dream of a ridiculous man: “On our earth we can love truly only with suffering and through suffering! We are unable to love otherwise and we know no other love. I want suffering, in order to love.” Another great year on the mountain in the books, more lessons learned and friends made. From the messages of our ancestors, both ancient and more contemporary to all of us and the memories we carried on the trail all reconnected once again. I am already looking forward to what walking that same path will reveal next year.?