The Earth Was on Fire

Standing on a mountain while another one erupts next to you, and what it teaches you about your own power — and about the unsexy art of just continuing.

Fuego volcano in full send mode

There's a moment around midnight on Acatenango, Guatemala when you stop talking.

You have hiked five hours uphill into thinning air with a pack you packed too heavy and dust in your teeth. You have eaten whatever was handed you (jerky sandwich?!). You have set up your tent at twelve thousand feet with hands that are not entirely yours yet. You have crawled out of that tent because the man in the next tent said come look, and now you are standing on the lip of a ridge in a circle of seven men watching another volcano, three miles away (but right in front of you), erupt.

Fuego does not erupt politely. It erupts on a schedule of roughly twenty minutes, with a low boom you feel before you hear, and then a fountain of orange opens up against the black sky. Lava arcs out in slow motion. The sparks fall for what feels like a full count.

After the initial oohs and ahhs nobody says anything for a while. Somebody finally fills the silence, not because anything needed to be said, but because it is hard to find the words attached to what you are feeling when you are connected to the earth.  

I keep coming back to that midnight in my head.

And the lava

The volcano did not have to earn anything

That's the line I scratched into my journal the next morning, by headlamp, before the sunrise push.

The volcano did not have to earn anything.

It was not asking for permission. It was not asking what the room thought of its performance. It was not strategizing for the next eruption or apologizing for the last one. It was not negotiating with itself about whether this was the right time. It was simply doing the thing it had been doing for thousands of years.

I had spent most of my adult life trying to earn the right to be the size I am.

Most of the successful people I know (especially the men) are doing some version of that. We work, we win, we add credentials, we accumulate proof — and at some quiet level we are all still trying to earn the permission to occupy the space we already occupy. To want what we want. To take up the room our presence already takes up.

Fuego does not have that problem.

The frame the men at the retreat kept using for this was sovereignty. I don't love jargon, but the word landed. There's a kind of power that does not require permission. There's a kind of presence that does not need to be earned. Standing three miles from a volcano at midnight, in a circle of men who'd already seen me cry once and would see me cry again before the week was out, was the first time in a long time I had been near that kind of power without flinching from it.

I'm still working out what to do with that. The post I'd write three weeks from now would be different from the one I'm writing today. But the volcano gave me something I didn't have a word for before, and the closest English I have is: some power isn’t earned.

The other thing the mountain taught me — which I'd just learned a few weeks before

There's a less mystical lesson sitting alongside the mystical one, and I want to name it because it's the one I keep using.

A few weeks before I went to Guatemala, I did a twenty-four-hour endurance event in Jacksonville Beach with my nephews. Six events around the clock. Sleep, theoretically. By 2 AM I was walking under streetlights with hips that had filed a formal complaint, and I figured out something I have not stopped using since.

It's amazing what you can do if you just keep going.

That sentence sounds like a coffee mug. It is also the entire content of the Acatenango summit push.

The summit push goes at 4 AM. It is forty-five minutes of straight uphill on volcanic rock, gravel and dirt, where for every two steps up you slide one step back, in temperatures that are not advertised in the brochure. There is no version of that climb that feels good in the middle. There is a version of that climb that ends, at sunrise, with all of you standing thirteen thousand feet up watching Fuego turn pink and gold against a horizon you cannot believe is real.

The only thing that gets you from the bottom of the gravel to the top of it is one foot in front of the other foot. Not strategy. Not technique. Not breath work, although the breath work helps. Just the decision, made a few thousand times, that you are going to take the next step.

I had the same realization in Jacksonville Beach in front of three twenty-somethings. I had the same realization on Acatenango in front of a sunrise. The thing that makes a person able to do what they're not sure they can do is almost always the same simple thing.

You keep going.

Two lessons that are actually one lesson

I have been trying to figure out, since I came home, why the volcano post is the one I most wanted to write.

I think it is because the two lessons turn out to be the same lesson.

The sovereign volcano did not have to earn anything. It also kept going. Volcanoes in this spot have come and gone for two hundred thousand years, on no schedule but their own, asking permission of no one. The reason it does not have to earn its power is not separate from the reason it keeps erupting. They are the same. .

The people I most admire are like that. They are not trying to earn it. They are not strategizing about it. They are just continuing. Showing up to the next conversation. Doing the next hard thing. Saying the next true sentence. Sovereignty and perseverance are the same trait wearing different clothes.

I don't yet have that in the way I want it. I have glimpses of it. I had a glimpse of it at 2 AM in Jacksonville Beach. I had another glimpse of it at midnight on a ridge in Guatemala, watching Fuego open up against the stars while seven other men stood quietly beside me and remembered something we had all almost forgotten.

The volcano was not asking permission to be on fire.

I am working on no longer asking permission to be myself.

A small thing you can do this week

You are probably not going to be standing on Acatenango any time soon, and you are probably not signed up for Ruckapalooza, and that is fine.

But somewhere this week there is a thing you have been negotiating with yourself about. A conversation you've been rehearsing. A sentence you've been editing in your head. A step you have not yet taken because you are still trying to earn the right to take it.

Just take it.

Don't earn it. Don't strategize it. Don't optimize it.

Take it the way a volcano takes the next breath.

Then keep going.

Keeping going...