"I think he was quiet because his thoughts were loud." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"I, too, want to create a cartography for my life that only I can draw. It's no longer that important to me to place a flag on a summit and check it off on my map. What matters most are the questions that I ask myself between each mountain, and the answers that lead me to the next one. I want to grow with the evolution of these lines and with the spaces between them." — Kazuya Hiraide, translated from Japanese by Hiko Ito Alpinist Magazine, Issue 75, "A Map of the Heart: From Shispare to Rakaposhi"
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." — Unknown
"Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I actually was." — Cheryl Strayed Wild
"I spend a lot of my time moving at someone else’s pace, trying to accommodate, appease, and appeal. My personality is one that constantly needs to help, be supportive, be a quality team player, and to contribute as much as I can. It’s mostly satisfying, but if I get too absorbed in moving in others’ flow, I lose my own." — Ellysa Evans She Explores, "A Solo Camp for the Books"
"If you want to be someone who is brave, live with courage. If you want to be someone who is honest, tell the truth. If you want to be someone who is strong, do something that requires strength. Do those things and therefore become the kind of person who would do them. Wishing or aspiring to be a certain way does nothing. You must act. You must act that way until you are that way." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"It turns out there is a difference between wanting to be something and wanting to become something. Wanting to be something indicates a hope that somehow you will be struck by lightning and suddenly be that thing you wanted to be. Wouldn’t it be nice if I were suddenly, somehow, more outgoing, more confident. Hoping to be something is passive, and passivity gets you nowhere. Being is a state, and becoming is a process. And to be, you must become. Becoming requires work. Becoming requires action. Becoming means deciding you’re going to achieve something and taking real quantifiable steps in that direction." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"Saying something is impossible is a great way to get out of having to try." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"By taking off the pressure of having to excel at or master an activity, we allow ourselves to live in the moment. You might think this sounds simple enough, but living in the present is also something most of us suck at. Think about how focused you become when you’re presented with something totally new to accomplish. Now, what happens when that task is no longer new but still taps into intense focus because we haven’t yet mastered it? You’re a novice, an amateur, a kook. You suck at it. Some might think your persistence moronic. I like to think of it as meditative and full of promise. In the words of the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, 'In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.’ … By exposing ourselves to the experience of trying and failing we might develop more empathy. If we succeed in shifting from snap judgments to patience, maybe we could be a little more helpful to one another—and a whole lot more understanding. If we accept our failures and persevere nonetheless, we might provide a respite from the imperative to succeed and instead find acceptance in trying. Failing is O.K. Better still, isn’t it a relief?" — Karen Rinaldi New York Times, "(It’s Great to) Suck at Something"
"It used to be, on many days, that I could close my eyes and sense myself being perfectly happy. It’s a worthy thing to ponder, but maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, 'twixt two extremes of passion—joy and grief,' as Shakespeare put it. However much I’ve lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonders
"Often the idea of change is more difficult than the change itself." — Sarah Marquis Wild by Nature: From Siberia to Australia, Three Years Alone in the Wilderness on Foot
"Worrying that you are crap is a waste of time. Worrying that you can’t do it is a waste of time. Worrying that you failed is a waste of time. No one cares. Just get on with it." — Peter Capaldi
"Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Suffering is ultimately created by a resistance to what is, by a sense that the universe owed you something different than what you got, that things were supposed to be a different way." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"But there is this: They also won't tell you that you'll be strong. That you will rediscover what excites you, what breaks your heart, and how to love yourself again. And that by honoring yourself, you are honoring those who hold their own story close to themselves and cannot speak up. The paradox of resilience is that it provides you the strength and power to navigate through hardship, but it doesn't make you invulnerable to pain. Instead, resilience builds your capacity for radical compassion and hope." — Kathy Karlo
"The important thing is to go as far as possible despite the uncertainty, instead of wondering if it might have been possible after not even trying." — Kei Taniguchi Alpinist Magazine, Issue 68, "Pandora's Box" by Akihiro Oishi
"Or you could rise. That 'or' is always available to us, no matter how vehemently we pretend it’s not." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. ... Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning
"Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity." — Unknown
"Fear can create a positive feedback loop. We are afraid, so we shrink and further invite the thing that scares us to occur. To beat the fear, to give ourselves a fighting chance at realizing the best possible outcome, we have to go all in and face it." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"We are all existing on thin ice, not only in the mountains. Each loss evokes the often-invisible voids beneath our feet. Each threshold moment can seem to open a multitude of branching, alternative timelines, like the patterns of frost on a window, curling into infinite fractal forms, tracing phantom narratives of falls untaken, ice unbroken, illnesses uncaught, decisions unmade." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
