It's Not Just the Weight of the Backpack

It's also how you carry it

(To hear an audio version of this post, click above.)

My son and I climbed Mt. Sherman last week.  If you’re not from Colorado, you may not know Mt. Sherman is one of our 58 peaks over 14,000 ft.  If you are from Colorado, you probably know Mt. Sherman is one of the easiest of them.  Which I had to keep telling myself as my lungs begged for mercy on the way up.  There are easier 14ers, but there are no easy 14ers (at least not at my age!).

As we hiked, I carried a backpack containing extra layers of clothing, some snacks, sunscreen and two bottles of water.  All in, it probably weighed 20 pounds.  But strapped to my back, I hardly noticed it.

What if, however, I had decided to carry the same bag in my hand with my arm outstretched in front of me the whole way.  I wouldn’t have made it ten minutes, right? Why?  Because of the simple but profound truth that what we carry feels very different, depending on how we carry it. 

The same contents, the same exact weight, held differently, creates a very different experience.  I know this seems ridiculously obvious.  But think about this a moment.  How heavy something feels is not determined only by how heavy it is.  This is good news, my friends.  Very good news. 

Life can be hard.  Sometimes really hard.  And even times when things feel easier, they’re still not easy.  As soon as we solve one problem, another pops up.  Every time we dig a hole in the sand, more sand slides in.  While we’re working to fix one thing, something else is about to break.

This is the nature of life.  And no matter how skilled and efficient we become at solving problems, the truth is we will always have them.  Always.  For the-rest-of-your-life.  Forever and ever, amen. 

Have I depressed you yet?  I don’t mean to.  I’m actually trying to say something hopeful.  Because once we really ‘get it’ that we will never be rid of our problems…then we can stop trying to win an unwinnable fight. And instead of devoting all our time to getting things out of our backpack, we can focus a little more on something just as important: how we carry it. 

How we carry our backpack is at the heart of the spiritual life.  Consider the life of Jesus for a moment.  He was certainly a healer.  But he didn’t actually ‘fix’ the problems of the world, did he?  What he offered was a different way of seeing the world.  A different way of carrying it. Which changes everything.

Because when we begin to glimpse life more deeply and clearly…when we glimpse that we are actually more than just these physical bodies and life is more than just this physical plane…when we glimpse that our deepest, truest self is irrevocably interwoven with, and inseparable from, the Mystery we call God…and we glimpse that despite its hardships, this life is also absolutely soaked in Love…then even though our problems remain the same, they’re different.  And life is different.  Because we’re different.

Until next time,

Ian