Going into summit day,[^1] I recorded three things in a little notebook. *i.* *impermanence* In the afternoon before our summit day, a little bird hopped around our campsite nestled at some few thousand feet. Ten seconds later, it flew away. For some reason, this image consumed me — enough that it was the first thing I wrote down in my notebook. Summit day starts with rest from 4pm-11pm, with the group awoken for dinner in between. I suppose that's where the trouble started. At 7pm, I walked into the tent, and suddenly realised I had lost the smoothness of sitting down. I'm truthfully not sure how else to put it: usually, you walk into the tent, you sit down, and you begin eating. I just had some problems moving from step one to step two. Bizarre, a bit off, but not hike-ending concerning. Our head guide measured my oxygen levels after the meal. I had been scoring around 90 for the past few camps, a feature that I took just a bit of pride in. This was, of course, karmically balanced by the 65 that I was now suddenly scoring. We attributed it to cold fingers or dehydration, not actual oxygen sickness — and besides, we were so close, it'd be unbearable to stop at basecamp. We began climbing in the darkness a few hours later. I threw up before the hike. And then during. And then again. Before I knew it, I was alone, behind the group, planning to hike eight consecutive hours in subzero weather with nothing in my stomach. The guide with me didn't believe I had slept for ~six hours with the amount I was wavering back-and-forth on the trail.[^2] I asked for a break every four or five minutes. And such was the start of my summit day. ~ One of the mantras my guide kept repeating was that "nothing was permanent". The pain and discomfort would pass, he insisted, like the moments when you suddenly become aware of little birds surviving on the top of mountains with tiny lungs; the laughs & sighs as we trek up mountains with our friends. All of these flashes get compressed by time & memory, so that both the good & the bad become sand in the palm. One conversation I had with Prince, who had just come back from a gnarly three month stint in the wilderness, offered the common but important insight of the power of a positive mindset. Focusing on the little things often helps get you through. This little piece of advice is repeated — repeated often — and the instinct is often to disregard it as cheesy or stock. But seeing as nothing is permanent, who minds a little repetition? Things tend to be too small anyway. *ii. faith* Not many of my religious views are public on this blog [[bratislava, slovakia|(1)]]; yet when I was writing, I was suddenly compelled to write down a notable prayer (you know the one — serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and so on). I've never written a prayer down before that day. ~ The terrain up to the peak of Kilimanjaro is extremely mountainous, to the point it's almost offensive. Earlier days reward you with parts of flat land — even a downhill if you're lucky — and summit day shamelessly asks you to wake up in the middle of the night and scale sixteen million hills that loom over you. I'm not certain how I scaled many of these hills — as you'll read, I'm not certain of many things in this night — but these winding paths certainly got old quickly. Faith prolonged their acceptability, or mental calluses did; or perhaps they're the same. Not much time was spent pondering this question of faith — there were evident limitations on brainpower that day; but more relevantly, my guide/porter duo had tired of my sole, wavering company and contrived an elegant catch-up with around half of my group. Thus began the second part of my hike. As a group, we managed to keep moving until the sun came up. We stood on the face of Kilimanjaro as the sun broke the clouds, revealing a dark mountain hugging camps that were shrouded in fog — camps that we had stayed in just a few days ago, camps where the little birds hop around. The view that morning was the first reward we had received for our midnight efforts. The wavering stabilised; sleep became a forgiven loss rather than a desperate debt. > *I've written the play by play of the rest of the night chronologically, for there is legitimately no other way to organise these realities. Factual errors can be expected.* Turns out, one problem that arose was that I was suffering a severe oxygen shortage. Here's a [[a day on killy|play by play]] of my experiences. In short: I did not trust any guide (unfortunate, because they were trying to give me life-saving oxygen), I became convinced I was being kidnapped by a sleeper eco-terrorist cell, and that the royal families of both Tanzania and China (??) were invested in my survival at some point. So it goes. *iii. process* The final thing I wrote down was the question "what did I learn" with a big circle around it; the idea being I would answer it on the top of the summit. For obvious oxygen-related reasons, I didn't get around to it. On the drive back from the mountain, I borrowed & finished a copy of *[[readings/the alchemist|The Alchemist]]*. Going through the process of climbing Kilimanjaro is advertised as a gruelling experience that evolves you; a herculean task that is challenging enough to replace the original "destiny" laid out in the Alchemist. One idea of the book is that going through this process of fighting & continuing & not giving up on the dream can be more valuable than the outcome itself. The actual outcome of Kilimanjaro is that I've technically summited (as a friend put it: physically, my body has been up there, mentally, not so much); my fingers are still weirdly tingly; and my face/body are broken due to HACE. The process of getting to the summit is slightly different. It involves a substantial amount of trauma bonding; taking stock of the little pleasures & moments; and an absurd amount of faith & trust, both in yourself and the forces that guide you. I know it's overplayed to say the process of climbing was more valuable; yet these connections we form and beliefs we solidify, no matter their impermanence in the long run — actually, especially given their impermanence in the long run — deserve at least a little bit of repetition. That's what I'll take from the climb — even if I had the brain capacity to remember the summit, which was certainly not the case. *iv. epilogue* I didn't like the epilogue to [[readings/the alchemist|the Alchemist]];[^3] I might dislike this one as well. I recently finished Kurt Vonnegut's *[[readings/slaughterhouse five|Slaughterhouse Five]]*. One of the alien mechanisms mentioned in the book is reframing time away from being a line, but instead something closer to an open field, where moments do not happen in strict sequence. Call it a weird form of time travel. Kilimanjaro felt more like a group of moments than a linear sequence. Day one could have been day four. Some days had their own identities — the day we got the speaker, the day we climbed the wall, the day I got kidnapped by an eco terrorist cell — but as a whole, in my head, the trip was a collection of moments that weren't divided by nighttime. With less grouping, it's become easy for individual moments to downsize and slip away.The incongruity of this trip with the structures of my human memory — memory that unfortunately lacks the alien mechanisms of *Slaughterhouse Five* — will almost certainly make it harder to repeat moments. My faith-based answer is that maybe the details will be less important than the feelings we shared on the mountain: feelings of accomplishment, belonging, and, for some of us, of course, varying degrees of oxygen shortage. [^1]: The day you climb to the peak of Kilimanjaro; a day that requires ~1000m of elevation gain. [^2]: Without someone behind me, I legitimately might have fallen off the mountain. [^3]: This is top of mind as I just finished it on the way back from Kilimanjaro.