Now is all we have, my friends. You have to choose now. You have to live in the heartbreaking reality that is what you see and perceive in this moment…the mess, the beautiful schisms that make for wars and love and peacemaking and harmony and change. The rawness of being so low some days that all you can muster up as your purpose is just to keep breathing – and then realize that’s all there is either way. Maybe it is about diving into the deep end and letting now be more than just enough. Realizing that things are only ever as boring and mundane as we let them be. That there are mysteries and experiences and fascinatingly foreign parts of life that we won’t see until we take a step out on the wild side, the side of us that isn’t concerned about tomorrow.
— Brianna Wiest (Now is all You Have)
I arrived in Kathmandu two days ago still breathing shallow, still making mental lists of all the shit I need to get done before I can finally switch-the-fark-off. Still carrying the weight of a life that does not easily pause.
It is not just the logistics of departure that follow you across borders, but the invisible threads of responsibility, attachment, obligation – all the places you are expected to be, and all the people who have grown used to your presence (aka parental servitude) as a kind of constant. Even here, in a city that feels ancient in a way that renders urgency almost absurd, I can feel those threads humming, stretching, resisting the distance I am about to put between us.
Tomorrow, I will leave it all-the-fark-behind. Yep I’m officially ‘out of office biatches’… I’ll be boarding a helicopter from Kathmandu to Lukla, and from there begins a slow, deliberate ascent through the insanely awe-inspiring nature of the Khumbu Valley, to Everest Base Camp and onwards, much higher still, as my legendary guide, Ang Dorje Sherpa, and I continue on to ascend and summit Lobuche East (6,119metres eeeek).
This is a plan that has lived in my body for many, many months now – first as an idea, then as a commitment, and finally as something that has demanded a quiet, persistent reshaping of who I am. Training for the expedition has not been linear. It has been humbling in the way that only the body can humble you, forcing me to reckon with old injuries and both self-imposed and real limits I did not expect, and to adapt in ways I did not anticipate.
There is also a particular kind of confrontation that comes with being a total newbie – a green-grass-beginner again, especially in the intimidating world of climbing and mountaineering where the stakes are real and the margin for error is narrow. You cannot bluff your way at height, let alone at altitude. Nor can you fake-it-til-you-make-it when you’re shaking with fear and cold in equal measure, ice axe in double-gloved hand, crampons on booted feet. This is real AF and this is going to be humbling. You cannot bargain with altitude, or charm your way around the fact that you may have cut corners on your aerobic training, when the air thins to half of what your body once knew at sea level. This shit gets real, and it gets real fast. Nature will smack your underprepared arse down in a flash. You either meet the moment with presence, or you do not meet it at all. It has taken serious preparation.
But if you’re going to do something for the first time, you have to start somewhere, right? Well, here we go.
And yet, beneath all of that preparation, there has been something else running parallel – a quiet, persistent sense of guilt (largely mother-guilt, but also business-owner-guilt) that has refused to be reasoned away. It is not dramatic or particularly overwhelming, but it is constant. It surfaces in the small, specific absences I am choosing: my son’s Head of the River race, postponed once already, as though the universe itself had offered me a second chance I am now declining; his driver’s license test, a threshold moment I will not witness; six weeks of my boys’ lives, not just the milestones but the ordinary, irreplaceable texture of daily existence. It is Easter, school holidays, everyday life that will happen without me, moments that will pass unmarked in my absence. It is also my work I am stepping away from – clients I care deeply about, a business that is alive and growing, opportunities that require presence and attention and continuity. I am asking it all to let me go, let me leave, to wait for me, to be there on the other side when I return, and that comes laced with a quiet sense of guilt.
There is no clean way to reconcile this. There is no version of the story of me scooting off into the sunset for 6 weeks in which everything is held perfectly, in which nothing is sacrificed. To choose something like this for myself is, inevitably, to not choose something else. But beneath the guilt of abandoning my children and my business, beneath the negotiation and the internal accounting, there is a deeper recognition: and that is I need to choose myself.
What I am seeking for myself, in leaving, is not escape but return. Not to a place, but to a state of being that is increasingly difficult to access within the noise of a life that is always on, always responsive, always moving. There is something about prolonged physical effort – about simply walking for hours and hours each day, about the steady, rhythmic demand of breath and movement – that strips away the excess. The mind, deprived of its usual distractions, begins to quiet. The body, pushed into fatigue, becomes impossible to ignore. And somewhere in that convergence, there is an opportunity to listen in a way that is otherwise unavailable for most of us in the madness we call western culture.
As much as I am here waxing lyrical about it all, I do not expect this is going to be a romantic process. It will be uncomfortable, often tedious, occasionally scary and frequently confronting. It will require a willingness to sit with whatever arises, without immediately reaching for distraction or resolution. But it is precisely in that space that something shifts. The tiny seeds of transformation can germinate. You begin to notice what has been draining you, and what has been sustaining you. You begin to feel, rather than think, your way through the questions that have been waiting beneath the surface of your far-too-busy-life. And over time, there is a subtle but significant recalibration – a reorientation toward what is true, rather than what is expected.
The prospect of turning fifty (ahem, that would be on May 6, just in case you want to send me a present) sharpened this awareness. Not in a dramatic, existential way, but in a quiet, undeniable sense that time is no longer an abstract concept. It is tangible. Finite. I am staring down the half tonne. Yep. Fitttty-years-mate. And still, hopefully, with a full pineapple ahead. And therefore, the way it is spent matters in a way that cannot be indefinitely deferred.
This Himalayan expedition is, in many ways, a conversation with that reality. It is an acknowledgment that there are things I still want to test, still want to prove – not to anyone else, but to myself. That I am still capable of setting a difficult goal and working toward it with consistency and discipline. That I can adapt, learn, and persist even when the path is properly scary and definitely uncertain. That I can inhabit my own life fully, rather than simply managing it (often from just behind everyone else’s lives I also seem to be running).
The mountain, ultimately, is incidental. It is the context, not the point. What matters is the process of becoming that it facilitates; the version of myself that emerges through the training, the preparation, the discomfort, the sustained effort. One day, this mountain will recede into memory, its details softened by time and distance. But the changes that occur in the process of climbing it – the ways in which I am forced to confront myself, to adapt, to endure – those will remain. That’s why I am here taking this crazy shit on. Head on.
And so, I am choosing to step away from the beautiful, dull hum of my busy everyday life, even with the lingering guilt, even at an eye-watering cost. I am choosing to trust that the relationships and responsibilities I am temporarily leaving will hold, that absence does not negate their importance, but may in fact deepen it. I am choosing to believe that tending to the relationship I have with myself is not an indulgence, but a necessity – the foundation upon which everything else is built. Why is this so damn hard to admit, let alone live by?
There is a discipline in this kind of proper-off-grid-satellite-phone-only-sort-of-disconnection, a deliberate refusal to remain constantly tethered to the demands of everyday life. It is not about rejecting those demands, but about creating space in which to see them more clearly, to engage with them more consciously. In a world that rewards constant presence and productivity, there is something quietly radical about choosing to step offline, to become temporarily unreachable, to allow the noise to fall away. I have always been a rebel. So, LFG.
It is only in that quiet that you can hear what has been there all along – the steady, insistent voice that knows what matters, that knows what is worth your time and your energy, that knows who you are beneath the roles you occupy. The answers have always been within. Bring it on.
One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.
And that is the point of the mountain.
— Brianna Wiest (The Mountain is You)
Rach Taylor is a high-performance career and life coach, life after sport and athlete transition coach,
wanna-be-DJ, speaker, Olympic medallist, and former senior HRguruleader. Rach brings Olympic-level insight, real-world HR and leadershipscarsexperience, a geeky obsession with human optimisation, and a no-BS, heart-led approach to every space sheplaysworks in. Based in Perth, Australia. Working with clients and collaborators globally. Check it out rachtaylorcoaching.com
