Getting Down the Mountain
I went to Greenland in February to see the northern lights and, if I was lucky, polar bears. I had planned the trip alone, the way I plan most of them. The day it all went wrong started with a six-hour snowshoe hike up a mountain outside the capital, in temperatures well below zero.
On the descent, three things arrived at almost the same time. A five-year relationship ended. An email told me that a surgical contract I had held for years was terminated, without cause or explanation. And the seal I had eaten the night before, undercooked, it turned out, made itself known. Any one of those would have been a bad day. Together, on the side of a mountain in the Arctic, with hours of descent left and no one coming, they were something else.
What I remember most is how small my world got, and how deliberately I made it that way. I could not do anything about the relationship from that slope. I could not do anything about the contract. I could not even do much about the food poisoning. What I could control was my breathing, my footing, and my water. So that became the entire project: breathe, move, hydrate. Not because I was calm. I wasn’t. It was because I had learned in operating rooms and in a small airplane with a failed engine that the way through a compounding emergency is to shrink your attention to the few variables that respond to you, and work them.
I got down. I got back to the hotel. And then something happened that I did not expect: the same narrowing that got me off the mountain kept working. Lying there that night, the situation looked different than it had on the slope. The relationship was over, and grief takes the time it takes; there was no decision to make there. But the contract was a decision. I had spent years becoming good at a specialized kind of work while depending on someone else’s letterhead to do it. That week, still in Greenland, I decided to build my own enterprise instead, my own contracting operation, my own client relationships, my own name on the work. Not out of spite. Out of arithmetic: if a single email can end your ability to practice your craft, the system you have built your life on has a single point of failure, and it is not you.
I stayed the rest of the trip. On the final night the sky cleared, and I saw the northern lights I had come for.
I have thought a lot since then about why that day became a hinge instead of just a story. I think it is because emergencies are honest. They tell you what your systems are actually made of, your habits, your health, your finances, your dependencies, with none of the flattery of ordinary time. The mountain did not teach me anything new. It audited me. Some things held: the training, the conditioning, the reflex to narrow focus instead of spiraling. One thing failed the audit, and it was the thing I fixed.
I don’t recommend the seal. But I have come to believe everyone gets a version of that descent eventually, the day several structures fail at once. You cannot schedule it and you cannot skip it. All you can do is decide, in advance, what kind of systems you want to be standing on when it comes. And when it comes anyway: breathe, move, hydrate. Deal with the rest at the bottom.