When did time start to go by so quickly? Looking out of my bedroom window across the family pool and the grass beyond I recall aged 7 dreaming of what it might be like to be a teenager at 14. I can recall at 14 dreaming of what it might be like to live in a dormitory of an American university with my Nike high tops scattered on the floor, just like the ad I had seen.
At some stage I finally realised that I was getting to an age where I wanted the clock to go back not forward.
In a recent Instagram Reel there was a quote from Marcus Aurelius where he said “you’ve lived as a citizen in a great city, five years or a hundred, what’s the difference? The law makes no distinction. And to be sent away from it not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by nature, who first invited you in. Why is that so terrible?
Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor. “But I’ve only gotten through three acts!” Yes, this will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, now directing your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So, make your exit gracefully.”
As my daughter and I walked through thick Alpine scrub and grasses I tried to do my best to paraphrase these words, not quite as successfully as I would have liked to.
I had decided to take her on a trek through the Snowy Mountains to a place called Blue Lake and to camp out overnight. It was her first time camping in the wild in a tent. During the course of the night there was an earthquake and then a thunderstorm. Thankfully by 4am she was sound asleep, and I was so pleased because I knew if she had been awake hearing the thunder cracking and the rain pelting, she might have been more reluctant to come camping again.
Sometimes you just need a break. I needed one. I don’t wish to complain, I have a good life. But sometimes I walk into the Studio and see the silk all piled up that needs cutting and the items that need folding and packing and I say “fuck my life”. It’s momentary. It passes.
But Aristotle was once asked “what is the biggest folly of man” and he responded, “that he sacrificed his health to make money only to spend money on trying to restore his health”.
There is something simple and wonderful about the Australian Alpine. Let me not romanticise it. There were funnel web spiders everywhere on the morning after the rain. We spotted a half dozen or more and that’s before we decided to get back on the fire trail. The females kill the males after breeding. The males were on their backs. I thought “good metaphor for the current environment” and turned to my daughter and was about to say “reminds me of your mother” only I held my tongue.
These moments though, to be with my daughter, watching her learning to hot step between rocks as we crossed the river, watching her take to hiking poles, seeing her go and fetch water with our various water sacks from the fresh brook cascading down rocks between the Alpine grasses – this is life’s great pleasure for me.
We decided to take one tent, so our guide Lewis was in there too. And the three of us managed to find a 4g signal and at 2100 metres or more above sea managed to watch James Bond “Skyfall” by hanging the screen to the top of the tent.
These are the moments that I would like to think we get to keep forever. But as the wise Roman Emperor reminds us, it is nature that invited you in, it is nature that will direct your dissolution and you will have no hand.
I know the stories my mother tells me of holidays she took with her father and how he had a great bond with her. I hope one day my daughter will tell the same to her children. That’s kind of all I wish from Santa this Christmas. That, and that I may take my daughter one day to hike the Swiss Alps (maybe a ski too).
There is something about a hike that is very rewarding. As Lewis likes to explain “it is type 2 leisure” – it isn’t just lying on a beach getting a club sandwich delivered with a diet coke, it’s working for something, exerting yourself, being exhausted by the end of the day, but having drunk from a cold stream or bathed in one, you are happy and content.
I am wishing you a wonderful Christmas and hope you explore nature. I am also letting you know that a second Christmas sale is coming, I just got side tracked monologueing.
