I write this not because I have reached the peek of my mountain but because I am still climbing it.
Writing this reminds me of a time during the Christmas season when we had gone camping at the foot of Mt. Kenya with a youth group from my church. We arrived at the venue in the later hours of the afternoon and everyone of us was so eager to see Mt. Kenya for the very first time. We didn’t. All we saw was a fog covered mountain but we still believed that somewhere between the fog the peak of the mountain stood. To see the peak one had to wake up early. This we came to learn from the locals who couldn’t understand our excitement with the mountain.
It was quite cold camping there but this did not hamper our desire to see the mountain after which our country is named. Most of us, if not all, braved the morning cold just to get a glimpse. We eventually did and the excitement was gone.
On the day of our departure back to Nairobi I found myself lingering, almost embarrassed by the simplicity of the whole thing. The mountain had not thundered a revelation; it had merely appeared, indifferent to our excitement, and then receded again into its habitual shroud of cloud. What stayed with me wasn’t the sight of the peak but the stubbornness with which we kept waking up for it; our ridiculous, hopeful insistence that it had to mean something.
As the bus rattled down the road, I kept thinking about how much of life is exactly like that: the long cold nights, the waiting, the imagining, the certainty that the summit – once visible – will clarify everything. Yet clarity rarely arrives in a flash. Sometimes it is the fog, not the mountain, that teaches you how to move.
So when I say I’m still climbing my mountain, I mean that I’ve learned not to trust the excitement of arrival. Peaks reveal themselves only briefly, and usually when you’re too tired to celebrate. What matters – what has always mattered – is the quiet persistence of keeping on, even when the view refuses to cooperate. That is the only way any of us ever make our way upward, step by stubborn step, into whatever morning light is willing to meet us.
Sam Dennis 