A Rite of Passage

 

Rites of passage in life can be a bit like crossing the monkey bars.  Sometimes swinging from one stage to the next is as easy as crossing the street.  Sometimes it’s like crossing the Grand Canyon on a tight rope.

 

 

My friend Kieran’s story about his right of passage is one for ages.

I’ve known Kieran for nearly 40 years he’s  dear dear friend one of the smartest people I know. I sponsored his family in their immigration from Ireland. Kieran is brilliant, passionate, loyal, intensely creative and a recovering alcoholic.

Here’s his story

Kieran had some years of sobriety by the time he turned 50 and, being a conscious soul, was thoughtful in terms how he would navigate the transition from one decade to the next.  It didn’t surprise me when he declared that he would celebrate the passage on Mt. Kenya.  He planned to summit the mountain using a particularly difficult route that was fraught with a number of technical climbing maneuvers.

Kieran had been an avid climber all his life, summiting many of Europe’s most difficult mountains.  His years in the American Northwest only sharpened his skills.  But at 50 he was no spring chicken and there was plenty about Mt. Kenya that ought to have given him pause.

Pause he did not.  It was Mt. Kenya or bust!

As it would happen, Mt. Kenya would challenge Kieran’s preparation, his agile mind and body, and his resolve to make passage into the next decade.

For it was on his descent that everything went wrong.  Very, very wrong.

He had limited rope line which required him to rappel down the mountain in stages.  One wrong move could spell disaster.  As fate would have it he made an incorrect link on one of his stages that flipped him over and left him hanging off the mountain – upside down.

This is where Kieran teaches us a great lesson.

He had packed ALL the equipment he’d need for the climb, including his spiritual equipment.  As he swung in the air thousands of feet above the ground he began to take stock of his real condition.  He quickly surmised that he could not right himself; his back pack made flipping himself over out of the question.  And even if he could, he would still be hanging in mid-air.  He realized that if he simply relied on his own power and strength he would surely die.

So he shifted his thinking from what he could do for himself to what might be available from the surrounding environs.  As he swung on his rope, he rotated 360 degrees so that he could see each section of the mountain.  In surveying the entire area he discovered a previous climber had left a harness bolt on the rock face.  If he could maneuver his way to that bolt he could reattach and right himself.

So carefully, very carefully, he swung himself over to the harness bolt, hooked in, and went on to complete his descent of the mountain.

The moral of this story, for me, is that if we bother to look outside ourselves, we can usually find a way through the predicaments that happen in our lives.

So remember to pack your spiritual equipment when you set out on your next rite of passage.

Just a Thought…

Pat

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