On false plateaus
The Muse Letter No. 39
In mountaineering there is a term called a false peak or false summit meaning that as your hiking up a mountain you might at a certain point think you’ve reached the top but upon reaching it you realise the summit is a lot higher and further away from you than you thought. It’s often used as a classical metaphor for life and success, how you’re never really at the top, that there’s always another challenge, another thing to succeed in, till at some point you’re dead. – This is not what I want to talk about today though.
Today I want to talk about a term that I kind of invented myself. I call it a false plateau. Meaning you think you’re walking on a horizontal line neither up or down while actually you are ascending or descending deeper and deeper and after a lot of time passing you realise: Shit. Something was happening all this time and now I arrived here: In this good or bad place.
And a lot of times I just took a breath held me tight and asked myself: What do I need right now?