My first and only backpacking trip as a Boy Scout was a certified disaster. Despite weeks of planning and a pack shakedown the night before the trip, where leaders went through and removed all the unnecessary stuff from our packs, I still had too much crap in my pack. Part of that was thanks to my dad, who affixed 50 feet of half-inch-thick white rope to my pack as if I were in The Eiger Sanction rather than on a weekender to Lost Maples State Natural Area.
I was a fat 12-year-old who wrote elvish marching songs for his Dungeons and Dragons campaign to the tune of Creed’s second album. Outside was hot, inside was nice. I had no grit, no sand, and no idea what the heck I was doing with a heavy pack on my shoulders, cutting off circulation to my arms. Halfway up a steep trail, I couldn’t go any further, and two older scouts had to carry my pack for me, along with their own, while I huffed and puffed and sweated behind them.
It is experiences like that awkward trip that the intrusive thoughts in my head remind me of most frequently. It’s led to a lot of what a mental health advocate might call “negative self-talk.” After a while, I believed it, for who could ignore the evidence, and the word I began to describe my life was “mediocre.”
Mediocre, according to my jiu-jitsu instructor, means “halfway up a rocky slope.” I wasn’t convinced that was accurate, so I looked it up, and he was not wrong. It comes from the Latin word mediocris, which literally means “halfway up a mountain.” How fitting, then, that I should be reminded of that one time I made it halfway up a trail and then wussed out.
So while that has set the tone for the conversations I have had with myself these 26 years later, it has also set the tone for how I fought my mediocrity. As I mentioned in this article, I had thought of myself as a life-long quitter until I realized how hard I had fought not to quit very important things in my life (including my life). One day, I realized: what if mediocrity was just a habit, not my identity? So I started pushing back.
Yeah, that was really embarrassing to have these older boys I looked up to carry my pack for me because I was so out of shape, I couldn’t handle it. But damn if it didn’t motivate me to fight to get better.
That is what Ryan Holiday of The Daily Stoic fame says when he talks about how “the obstacle is the way.” He says, “Obstacles are opportunities for excellence” because it is overcoming these obstacles—tackling them and dealing with them, not ignoring them—that helps us improve. In jiu-jitsu, we say “face the problem.” You have to turn into the choke or into the pressure of a knee on the belly in order to get out of it. So it is with all problems.
That trip sucked, but I stuck with it. I made Eagle Scout, hiked every trail I could, and fell in love with the outdoors. First, I lived vicariously through Backpacker magazine and Colin Fletcher’s books on walking the length of California and the Grand Canyon—then, I trained to live it myself.
Years later, I’m married and living in the Piedmont of the Appalachians in North Carolina. My wife and I decided to go on a backpacking trip, and I was going to die before I let her see me give up on some trail in the woods. So we trained. Every weekend for a year, we hiked a five-mile loop trail by our house with full packs. We practiced skills, tested gear, and slowly built up our endurance.
For our trip, I had chosen to backpack Panthertown Valley—”the Yosemite of the East”—in the Nantahala National Forest. It wasn’t a huge hike; there are no fourteeners east of the Mississippi River. It was a nice five miles in, five miles out, up and down slopes, with several stops at scenic waterfalls. But we absolutely crushed it. We purified water, navigated by map and compass, ate dehydrated food, and made coffee with an Aeropress and a dirty bandana because I had forgotten filters. Amanda got stung on the butt by a wasp while trying to pee in the woods, meanwhile, I belatedly realized I had no idea how to hang a bear bag in bear country—so I resorted to praying really hard
But most importantly, I didn’t end up halfway up a mountain slope, I went the whole way. Not like I had an option; the quickest way home was to keep going. The obstacle was the way.
Because of that one time at Scout camp, I don’t want to do things halfway. May my life never be described as “mid,” “meh,” or “mediocre” ever again, which is why I sometimes look back at these core memories of childhood with self-deprecation and a wink rather than a groan. Mediocrity isn’t a life sentence. It’s just a halfway point. Keep climbing. One step at a time, and before you know it, “mid” is far behind you.
Awake! Put on strength! 