Everest or Calvary
Am I on the wrong mountain?
For quite some time now we’ve been conditioned to believe what success is.
For many it’s family and friends. For most it’s wealth and affluence. Almost all wish for a healthy life or a long one.
For some it’s fame and for others approval and reputation. A few yearn for power. A lot more lately want influence.
There are those who crave learning and legacy - to traverse uncharted territories of knowledge (or like Musk, terrain) - or to leave a legacy having changed the world forever (in a Steve Jobs kind of way) so they can be remembered long after they’re gone.
These are the aspirational goals we’ve normalised as a society and we spend our entire existence pursuing one, many, or all of them.
In my work to date the top three are wealth, health and family. I’m yet to meet anyone who has extraordinary levels of all three.
When we single-mindedly dedicate our entire life to accumulating wealth, if successful, we may well be rich but perhaps old and lonely. A broken marriage and kids who hate us (perhaps not to our face if they want the inheritance). Every relationship is a transaction - every transaction is a competition.
Those that prioritise health, spending disproportionate hours a week in the gym, prepping protein shakes, wolfing down creatine or subscribing to the latest life-extending fads, often find they’ve left their loved ones behind -or dead - if they indeed live that comparatively long life.
A few focus on their family and friends - relationships - perhaps at the expense of all else - even themselves. Arguably the happiest of the three, if recent research can be trusted.
For most of my life, I joined the crowd trying to scamper up the mountain to reach the pinnacle in pursuit of these alluring goals.
When I thought I did, I yearned for a taller mountain - like most of my peers. Until I reached my Everest.
Now as I sit here in the wee hours of the morning of Holy Thursday heading into my 56th Easter, it seems I’ve been climbing the wrong mountain all along.
As we commemorate the Passion, death and resurrection of Christ this Easter, I cannot but confront the contradiction in what we consider success.
That wretched image of a man so badly beaten he was unrecognisable. Heaving himself and a wooden cross uphill. So broken that even his haters saw fit to get him help, fearing he might die prematurely and ruin their plans. Health was not achieved. At 33, neither was a long life.
Despite his recent popularity - the entire city had laid palms on the streets for him, even calling him a king - he was now despised. No approval. A ruined reputation, certainly lacking any influence. Powerless.
Poor, homeless and eventually naked, he had no wealth to his name.
Hanging embarrassingly on the cross gasping for his last breaths, he had no friends either. Of his apostles, one had just betrayed him for 30 silver pieces, whilst his most trusted ‘rock’ had denied him three times.
As for family, he turned to his surviving mother saying, “This is your son,” gesturing to another man - relinquishing even that.
And as this story ends, many still believe that all of this was for the salvation of the world - the greatest act of love. To change the lives of everyone that has ever lived or will live.
What if I’ve been trekking up the wrong mountain? What if all of those pursuits that we’re told we should dedicate our whole lives to were of little consequence?
Perhaps like Christ’s example it isn’t about health, or wealth, or family or friends or even some narcissistic desire for legacy (for all graves will be abandoned in three generations).
For all that we spend our lives accumulating must be left behind.
In fact, I’ve come to realise that the only things we take with us are what we give away. Sacrificing the very things that we’re meant to hold fast to. Living our life for others.
As in Christ’s example - to give of oneself until there is nothing left.
Perhaps it is Calvary, not Everest, that I must seek to climb.