A few weeks ago we hiked to the top of Multnomah Falls on the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. 

Made that sound like we simply bounded up the trails–pranced even–didn’t I?

I heaved my way up each switch back (there are eleven, though to be fair, the last three are back down a bit). A few of them are a tendon-screaming forty degree angle reminiscent of the first day out of Saint Jean Pied de Port on the Camino, which is like scaling up a twenty-mile roof. 

I had to stop often for several switchbacks. My excuses? The air is thin, which is true–I’ve lead a sea-level existence. Also, we had just driven eight hours. I could have come up with more, of course, but instead I rested, waved to the eighty-year-olds jogging past me, tried to trip a few kids bouncing up the path, and then continued. 

The thing is, I knew if I turned around not only would I feel bad for causing us to return to the car, but I’d be pissed at myself for quitting. My heart felt fine, my pulse, my feet. I wasn’t dizzy, faint, or laden with lactic acid. I was simply not used to this. So I kept getting up and pushing on, thinking about Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff into the river. People going back down all had some comment: “It get’s easier!” “It’s worth it!” “Not too much further!” Meanwhile in true humor-clad fashion, I had to hear “Hey Bob, only ten more switchbacks!” “Hey, guess how many now??? Nine! Oh wait, this is still ten, sorry.”

I made it. We hiked many trails after that one, up waterfalls and down beach trails, through the redwoods, and I don’t remember an issue again after that day. On the way back down from the top of the falls, of course I encouraged others. Sometimes, “It’s not that bad! Move it!” and other times, “How many times did you throw up so far? Everyone up the next trail is heaving over the edge. Have fun!”

The falls were worth the climb. The view, the grandeur, the inconceivable beauty in the falling of water across rocks and millennia to the river below. Worth every doubt. 

The ends are worth whatever means necessary. We know this, too. One question remains which I contemplated on and off for the rest of the journey down the coast and which I have thought about since: What am I capable of?

Will I finish the one-man play I keep putting off? Will I lose the weight? Tone up? I know how to write and I know what I want to do in the play, so why isn’t it done? At one time in my younger days I was actually an expert in weight loss and toning, training everyone from women who wanted to lose more than 100 pounds to the Holy Cross Football team. 

I. Know. What. I’m. Doing.

I don’t know why I’m not doing it. 

I finished my last book not because of some lightning strike: I just decided to. Meanwhile, a book I agreed to rewrite for a publisher nearly two years ago is sitting here next to the Cheese-Its, but suddenly I’m stricken with Adult Onset ADHD. Maybe it is depression. Anxiety. The Crocodile Men of the Congo. All of the above.

Age! 

sigh…no, it’s not

I know not to eat certain foods. I know to move enough to push my heartrate. I know how to breathe, to stretch, when I write I know how to pause after a line for emphasis and when to make the dialogue choppy and staccato and when to slow it down and smooth it out. It’s not a fear of failure or of success of boredom or being too busy to focus or too distracted. No, we all get like this. You know what I mean, right? You know what needs to be done, to be said, but we simply let it go, put it off.

We know we can but we don’t. That’s it in a nutshell. We know we can but we simply don’t. 

Certainly, most people use the age thing as the best excuse. They can’t move as fast, they’re not as agile. The knees hurt, the hips. The back, the feet, the ego. Many of them are right, of course, but just as many seem to slip out of shape and use age as the cause. Not the eating between meals, not the stagnancy, not the belly fat, the beer belly, the extra serving. Nope, it’s “age.”. “Sucks getting older” people say. 

But when was the last time you made a list of ambitions and then contemplated which items on the list you truly can’t do because of your decrepit body and which items you just slowly, methodically, without even noticing, stopped trying to achieve because “life” got in the way, and now “age” got in the way?

What am I capable of? Probably more than I think. 

So this: The country’s birthday is in a month and so is mine. For the country’s birthday, the president is hosting a UFC Championship Wrestling Match on the lawn of the White House. For my birthday I’m finishing the play, the book, losing the weight, getting in shape

I just decided to. 

See you in a month.