The guidebook described three possible routes up the harder east face of the Teepee Pillar, a tall granite tooth extruding from the southeast corner of the Grand Teton like a bucktooth vampire’s awkward incisor.

"You must stay on route. Getting off route can lead to serious consequences," the guidebook had asserted before launching into brief, vague route descriptions.

Four hundred feet up the cliff, we found ourselves off route. I had followed Chris and Brent and was the last to arrive. The next pitch was my lead and the thought of moving hand over hand up the steeply overhanging flake frightened me. To make things worse, I saw quickly that there would be no place for protection until I reached the end of the flake, twenty five feet away.

"Either of you guys want this lead?" I asked. Chris and Brent just shook their heads and waited for me to climb past them and out onto the flake. We named the pitch "Zig." I breathed more easily once I had slung a loop of webbing around the flake’s sharp point and clipped my rope to it.

"Overconfidence has gotten me this far," I whispered to myself before moving on across a section of loose, rotten rock.

Another three hundred feet up the pillar, Brent was following Chris up Zag, our second necessary route variation to correct another misjudgment. This sort of route finding is an inherent element of mountaineering on such an infrequently-climbed summit.

I waited below Brent, stemmed, wedged into a three-foot-wide chimney, one foot against the vertical wall before me and sitting on the other foot, pressed against the wall to my back, my two feet holding me between the parallel surfaces while offering mild protection from the cold wind as I waited my turn to climb.

"Dammit!" Brent yelled from above. I pulled my face from where I had buried it in my coat collar, looking up quickly, half expecting to watch Brent come tumbling off the rock toward me, falling until the rope above him ran out of slack and caught him.

"Dammit!" he yelled again. His trembling voice betrayed serious fear.

"What’s up?" I shouted. The wind gusted strong enough that I thought he might not hear my voice even at this close range. "You okay?"

Brent remained silent for a minute, then shouted down the problem.

"I’m holding a fifty-pound rock with my toe!! If I let go, it’s going to come right down on top of you!"

I didn’t learn the lesson to be perfectly careful and avoid all danger. Perhaps I would have had I not learned other lessons at the same time.

I learned that the thrill of adventure makes life run sweet in my veins. It makes me alert and alive, because everything depends on what you do in that next moment, everything hangs on that single quarter-inch edge of granite under your fingertips.

Sometimes you learn the right lessons, sometimes you learn wrong, and it’s not always an easy thing to unlearn. You’re far more likely to learn the wrong lessons if you’re going about your lessons randomly with no clear direction.

Today as I closed my eyes to the bright afternoon sun, letting the pleasant cacophony of falling water lull me to sleep, I almost envied the simplicity of Okonkwo’s life. My own typically-modern life, with its thousand demands and million possibilities, was, in comparison, an utter mess.

Not that I would give up any piece of my mess. Like a teenager’s room littered with toys and clothes, everything worth keeping disastrously cluttering the room.

At this time I was busy teaching college literature and composition classes while looking for another job that would actually pay the bills. I was grading papers and preparing lectures, meeting with students and mailing out résumés, running and biking in the foothills and trying to keep up an active social life. Despite the rush and tumble, life felt relatively stable and calm.

My mind drifted off to other thoughts and memories. About the thirty-six times I had moved during the course of my life. The places and faces I had known. The dreams that had been realized or forgotten or remained unfulfilled. The many grand achievements that now faded into insignificance—life always demanding new accomplishments to be rewarded, to validate my existence.

Perhaps a simpler life like Okonkwo’s would prove happier, but it was not an option. Not without the willingness to let go of too many things. I was caught up seeking both thrills and stability. I could never give up hope that life would someday be great and sweet and rewarding and stable. That I would learn and gain enough that life could be rich and deep without quite so much effort or fear that it might not last beyond the morning. I could never stop working to reach that goal until I finally neared that summit. I could never justify giving up for longer than a long weekend.

Even if I tried to slow myself down, I knew exactly what would happen.

As soon as I had taken enough time to truly relax, to enjoy the slower pace and lack of demands, to breathe deeply and taste the sweetness of still air and slow-paced days, the passion would catch up again. The ideas would come rushing at me and I would not be able to contain or restrain my enthusiasm. I would run off to live in another country or to climb another mountain or write another book or…or any number of things from an interminable list. Things would go slightly overboard and life would grow a little too busy again and soon I would be running, heart pounding and out of breath, to catch my dreams, wondering if maybe I should step back and slow down a little.

In a way, this made me no better than Okonkwo—either unwilling or unable to change even to save my life.

"Am I wrong?" I wondered. And did it matter? Would I change my ways and slow to a more reasonable pace even if it was possible? I didn’t think so.

The question was quickly drowned out by warm sunshine on my face and the relaxing pounding of water. I lay back on the grass and let my thoughts drift away into dreams, confident I would awake again in time for class, confident that we would find more than enough to talk about for today’s two hours.

I waited at the white board as conversations rolled to a close and students dutifully pulled their books from their bags and began flipping through the pages. By this time they knew what I meant by enduring themes. These were the lessons inherent in stories and literature. These were the things that applied, in some way, to the lives of other people, the concepts and experiences that will still apply to human life a hundred and a thousand years in the future.

"Beneath changing fashions and cultures and circumstances, the human experience is basically the same," I had told the class on the first day. My main goal in the class was to teach students to really benefit from reading, to learn to find these enduring themes and apply them to their lives, learning lessons the easy way, avoiding some of the pain of the hard experience often required to wake us up and make us change our ways.

The underlying themes we mostly focused on wrapped around Identity and Culture—who are we? How do we become who we are? How much control do we have over our identities and destinies?

The main paper assignment reflected this. They were required to choose an enduring theme from the reading and discuss the idea itself, supporting and showing the ideas through examples from reading and from their own lives. I doubted that many students had yet put much thought into their papers, but we had a great time discussing various possibilities.

One by one, students began volunteering enduring themes and I wrote them along the left edge of the board. "Anger." "Emotions." "Self Control." "Change." "Adapting." "Differences." "Tolerance." "Intolerance." "Reacting instead of acting." "Love." "Expression." "Despair." "Violence." "Peer pressure."

Milli raised her hand and I nodded at her. "The generation gap."

Soon we had two columns of enduring themes on the board and I recapped the pen. "Any more you’re dying to add to the list?" I asked. Silence. "All right, then, where do we start?"

Some days I came with lectures prepared. When we read a book from China, I brought coins and statuettes and pictures showing some of the things the book discussed, things I had collected on my first trip to teach English in the Orient. When we read A Clockwork Orange, full of Russian words converted to English slang, I brought a glossary to make the reading easier. But any given day, all I needed was a few good questions to start us moving, and the discussion would carry itself.

"Change," one student said. "Adapting," added another. I put a check next to the two words and looked back up at the class. "Any more?"

"Violence!" said Levi with pretended enthusiasm. I checked that as well.

"Okay," I began when no more words were added to our cue, "if you were writing a paper about change or adapting, what point might you want to make?"

"That it happens," someone said, "so you’d better get used to it."

"And if you try to pretend it doesn’t happen," added Levi, "you could get yourself in trouble."

"Nothing even has to change to have change," Milli said. The class turned toward her, wondering what she was talking about. "Like when I moved here from New York, it was a totally different life than what I had known, but nothing had really changed—not me, and not here. The only difference was that I changed places."

"True," Levi agreed. Jeremy nodded and Natalie looked steadily back up at me to see what I would say next.

"It sounds like there are a number of different kinds of change," I said thoughtfully. "Why don’t we make a list of these and then we’ll discuss whichever ones you want."

The discussion on change carried on for an hour and forty minutes without so much as a seven-minute lull. The board filled up with lists and diagrams. I finally glanced up at the clock and reluctantly ended the discussion.

If telling were all it took, I would give you a list and you would read it in ten seconds and be on your way to a fulfilling, marvelous existence. If telling could do the trick, you surely would have known it all a long, long time ago, along with everyone else in the world.

Understanding the secrets clearly enough to make all the difference requires experience—sometimes years of it, depending on where you’re coming from.

The lessons move toward and past us endlessly, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow, sometimes too soon, sometimes too late. Sometimes the lessons break us down and sometimes lift us clear, like a drop of frozen rain blown by high winds, tumbling endlessly through hazy clouds, growing ever-larger in the humid air, then suddenly rising into the bright sunshine above before falling again, plummeting downward toward the earth with a trillion other hailstones.

One is to experience more—to dive into life with abandon, chasing the breaking wave to the shore, fighting to keep up with the rising swell, hoping to feel those wondrous moments when gravity drags you along effortlessly, body surfing the forces of life that tumble, crash and swirl around you.

Second is to live through someone else’s experience. After all, once the wave has crashed on the beach, once you’ve crawled from the surf and dried yourself off on the waiting sand, once you’ve rinsed the salt from your skin and the vacation has ended, once you’ve returned home and moved back into your every day life, all you have left is a memory and perhaps a bit of skin still peeling from your shoulders from the recent burn. Experiencing someone else’s life, whether through reading or listening or observing, you take with you a piece of their memories, a precious piece of their understanding, and this piece becomes your own experience that no one can take from you.

The third shortcut is to ponder. Ponder with your mind and with your heart. Let the swells roll back and forth inside you, replay the crashing waves, the foamy surf, the salt on your tongue and the sand beneath your feet, let it grow more real, increasing your clarity with every retelling upon the mind’s stage.

The most common junior high school subbing assignments came from teachers who worked in the "resource" classrooms. The children here had been removed from other classes because of their utter lack of discipline and the havoc they wreaked there. How these teachers manage to get through as many challenging days as they do remains a mystery.

I wondered if the quote had been taped here to calm a teacher whose nerves were frazzled. Who had expected more from life but now struggled both to make ends meet on a teacher’s salary and to keep her sanity while fighting to maintain order among the preadolescents in her classes. I wondered if it served as a consolation, as some kind of permission to give up on other dreams or wishes for a more fulfilling life.

I am bound and determined to not allow the quote to become true for me. I am determined to fill my life with continual breathtaking vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. I believe I will succeed if I remain willing to do what it takes.

Maybe even if I succeed, even if life grows continually beautiful and thrilling, maybe the quote will still be true. Surely most of my efforts will not succeed—not on the first try, at least—and I will experience more than enough delays and sidetracks. But if I notice and remember only the thrilling and the beautiful, then my wish will have come true. Maybe only the perspective matters.

I will work at my dreams and the repetitive word "most" from the first quote will not, in the end, apply to my life.

Sweat poured down my forehead and into my eyes by the time I reached the high point on my usual ten-mile loop of single track. My lungs heaved and ached for more oxygen. My legs burned for a rest, already turned to jelly by the continuous uphill pump, but the sun was already sliding down past the horizon.

I pedaled slowly as the ground leveled off. Two thousand feet below me, the valley spread out flat, covered by the grids and squares of streets and homes. Six thousand feet above me, the summit of Mount Timpanogos glowed in the soft red light of dusk. All around me, the grass was just beginning to turn green beneath the dry, brown stalks of last fall. The trail wrapped in and out through patches of scrub oak where I sometimes startled small herds of mule deer waiting for night to wander and feed.

My heart rate slowed to a more comfortable level and I breathed the clean air deeply, enjoying the sweet and thrilling sensation of health and fitness. I could almost feel the steaming, red blood pumping fuel through the miles of veins and arteries meandering purposefully through my arms, legs, and brain. I felt perfectly awake and alive.

The path turned gradually downhill and I quit pedaling. Coasting along, the cooling breeze blowing softly against my face, turning the rivulets of sweat to white lines of salt, everything cleared from my mind and heart, leaving me floating through an inspiring moment of perfect calm, peace and beauty.