But I can't deny the unadulterated joy I have felt in each adventure, a joy so pure it must be separate from the addiction. Our mid-thirties is the time when most of us stop bouncing and start breaking. It's an age when we begin to fear that our luck may run out. I've been trying, these last few years, to find a way to hold on to the joy of adventuring while I also try to shed my penchant for unnecessary risk. The Buddhists believe that before they begin the life-changing work of their Zen practice, the world is exactly how it appears.
Mountains are mountains , they are famous for saying, and rivers are rivers .
But meditation has moved the student to a place where he can see that the mountains exist in relationship to the rivers and that they make each other possible. He has opened his eyes to the interrelatedness of everything, including the world and himself. In the last few years, all my mountains became rivers and all my rivers became mountains. In the most literal sense, I found myself negotiating rivers when they fell down rapids as steep as the sides of mountains, and I learned that rather than climbing to the top of mountains, I preferred to walk around them, to encircle them, the way a river would. I also lost every reference point that had kept me grounded in my fearless and emotionless life.