Do Good Lives Need to Be Sustainable?

Keely Dickes

Oct 1

By Keely Dickes

As I walked through the dark, nearly vacant streets of Aspen at midnight, there were tears prickling at my eyes. Why was I about to cry? They were hot tears and stubborn tears at once, confused tears and tears expressing desire. I hurt. I walked about a block down the street from the restaurant where I worked—where I bred fake smiles for customers in exchange for tips—and looked up at the sky.

There were a lot of stars. This is one of the understated benefits of living in a place like this, on the western slope of Colorado, where mountains beckon just beyond Aspen's borders and there aren't nearly as many people as on the front range. Light pollution is kept at a minimum. As extravagant, outlandish, and utterly humanized as the town of Aspen can feel, it is but a blip in the mountain landscape. I felt the smallness of Aspen and my emotions at the same time as I felt the immense weight of the sky, and I leaned my head further back until my neck ached and stared.

*The author topping out a climb the previous summer.*

I didn't regret it. I didn't regret the waitressing job I landed to pay rent in a more affordable town in the valley about a forty-five-minute drive from Aspen, I didn't regret racking miles on my car to commute to my restaurant job in a town full of rich, often entitled people, and I didn't regret not choosing a "career career." As in something intellectually stimulating, something involving more brain than body, something where you create a unique intellectual product that people desire. I knew I could have chosen that. I knew I had the skills and the work ethic. But standing there on that dark Aspen street, I was content with my choice.

Yet why was I crying? Who I was was starting to feel like a memory. I had been all idealism, all passion, all hunger, and all fight. I had been a pursue your passion at all costs kind of girl. And my passion was rock climbing and living outside, and so I rock climbed, and I lived in a tent for two months, and I hadn't felt as happy in my life before. I was so goddamn, stupidly happy. Living on cloud nine. I had felt so alive, so essentially enriched. It was like...that's what life was. For me. That's what pure, raw, good-without-further-justification life was. But after a few months on the road, I had to be practical, of course, because one cannot live indefinitely off of savings.

And it hurt. It still hurts. It turns out living so near to what you love can be blissful and torturous at the same time. Driving home from a day shift at work, I drive into the sunset as it hits the hills and mountains like the giant sloping backs of beasts. Sun rays from behind the peaks make them look enticing and forbidding at once, and as I drive down the valley, I stare at them like I am love drunk. Sometimes, my eyes water. The longing in me is so strong it almost hurts. I want so badly to be on the back of those mountains, among the pines that speckle the surface, sleeping in the realm of bears and other animals that know the forest better than we ever will.

And yet there I am, on a road down below the peaks with hundreds of other cars, commuting home from work with dozens of other commuters. Just another day at the restaurant. Just another day at the office. The monotony of it makes me cringe internally. It's like a wrench in my chest. The monotony is only worsened by the awareness of how essential it is. It is essential to show up to my shift with a smile and please the customers. It is essential to make money and drive back to my sublet, so I can pay rent, and repeat the process indefinitely. The thought of this pattern being infinite makes me feel trapped.

As I walked back to my car in the Aspen parking garage that night, words leaked out of my throat. My voice cracked in the middle of my words, and I knew my tears were pathetic, but I couldn't help it.

"I don't want to die without having lived," I said to the empty parking garage entrance.

I was hungry for life. What was living, to me? I wrapped my arms around my middle and bent forward at the waist ever so slightly. I thought of rock walls. I thought of peaks. I thought of running until I thought my legs would give out but they didn't, I thought of hauling a heavy pack up the Grant Teton so we could summit, I thought of the sunrise on jagged alpine faces, I thought of the scream I let out when I lunge for a rock hold a fraction of the width of my fingers.

My job is as conducive to sustainable, long-term climbing as a job could be. It's only four days a week, so I can climb the other three days. On a couple of my workdays, I can get up early and climb in the morning before I go in. But it's not entirely free-spirited. I can't drive off to the desert and sleep in the back of my car for weeks on end, feeling my body rhythm slow to the pattern of the sun. When the sky is bluebird and the temperatures are that perfect bridge between summer and fall, I can't seize it and go on an alpine mission. I have work that day, and instead, all I get of the mountains is a torturous long-distance stare on my drive into Aspen. That long-distance stare.

Is that what I'll have, more than anything? How will I cope?

Of course, there's always the full dirtbag climber option: quit the job, live in my car, dumpster dive for food if I want, fully immerse myself in nothing but what I want. Dissolve in my desire. Drown in it. Surrender to it, lust burning into love, feeling highs as high as the peaks I stand on and lows as low as the dirty car I have to sleep in every night. That's just it. My highs would be higher, but maybe my lows would be lower. Is adulting just balancing the highs and lows, idealism and practicality? Every choice has a consequence. There is no such thing as a free lunch. But a strong part of me lusts after pure idealism, minimalism, living an idea out until the end. History is full of such people: monks and other believers who sacrifice everything in order to pursue what their soul wants.

That's what I thought living to the fullest meant—throwing yourself in the face of what you love, and spending as much time as possible there, even when it gets challenging. I'm alive, so I want to feel alive. But I'm starting to learn I can't feel as alive as I feel climbing or running all the time. I can't feel the electricity of looking up at the stars alone while camping every night, and I can't forever roam among the forests. How can I temper this desire of mine? How can I be more content with monotony and civilization? Will a small part of me always nag with the sense that I am wasting my days while I choose stability? I don't yet know how to live, or which prices are worth paying. I'm not sure if I'll ever know. The only sense I have is this—that balance is key.

I have some semblance of the idea that to build a good life is to build a sustainable life, and living in a car forever (without working) is not sustainable. I'm trying to be sustainable. I'm trying to be an adult. It wasn't easy at first, but it's getting easier. I sleep better in a bed, after all. I'm becoming adjusted to the domestic life, or de-sensitized to the pain of missing constant fresh air—or maybe those two things are the same. But sometimes I'm reminded that the life I'm living now isn't as full as it used to be, and my philosophical mind asks itself, what is the point of life if you're not living it as fully as possible? That part of me feels like I am wasting my time. Wasting my days. Just biding time until I can jump in my car and drive off without a deadline and feel free again, without an agenda but for all the rocks I want to climb. But I guess part of being a real adult is realizing that isn't a viable option. Or is it? What happens to those who chase an ideal relentlessly? Does the ideal eventually, inevitably kill them?

Idealism and practicality. The two battle out in my mind. I still don't know the answer, and I don't know if I ever will. All I can know is the present moment, and for now, my plan is to be more practical than I was before. I'm considering it a test run, or a necessary evil in order to have a place to winter without carving deeper into my savings. Nothing is permanent and you will always have the freedom to change your mind—this is another silver lining of being a conscious being with free will.

Keely Dickes is an American climber and writer, formerly an intern for the climbing magazine Rock and Ice. Follow her travels on Instagram @keely.dickes.

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