How's Your Inner Landscape?

Last month I watched a climbing film about K2, the most treacherous mountain on earth. 

K2 is the world's second-highest peak. Everest may be taller, but K2 is way harder to climb. The conditions are brutal: sheer rock faces, pounded by wind, prone to harsh blizzards that appear in minutes. 4,000 people have climbed Everest. Only 367 people have ever conquered the "King of Mountains".

Just getting to K2's basecamp brings more danger than most Americans will face in their lives. Narrow trails with loose rocks and steep drops, hour after hour. Finally, the climbers in the film arrive.

They’re greeted by emptiness. Maybe a dozen tarps and tent poles, pounded into a rocky landscape. They wait here as their bodies adjust for altitude. The entire time they’re hounded by a relentless wind, so loud that they can hardly even speak into the camera. Finally, after a week of cold and lonely suffering, they hike on.

The crew eventually reaches the summit, the triumphant highlight of the 60 minute film. But in the days after watching, my mind kept swinging back to basecamp, that desolate wasteland. I didn't feel compelled to go there. Instead, I felt like I'd glimpsed a hidden truth of life in our modern world amidst the smattering of tents.

We all have inner landscapes. An active mind is a mental metropolis. Frequent flow states create grand structures in the mind. Solitude and reflection produce depth and calm, billowing trees lining your inner boulevards. That’s the ideal.

But the ideal is rare. Thanks to endless gusts of swipes and screens, most modern minds resemble K2 basecamp: a smattering of tattered tents amidst desolate, windswept rocks. When we visit our inner selves, there's almost nothing there. As Irish poet John O'Donohue puts it, we've had an "evacuation of interiority" altogether in our modern world, but our electronic habits are so ingrained, we’ve barely noticed.

No solutions, today. Just a thought.