The first time I ascended Mt. St. Helens it was May and the mountain was covered in snow. Mt. St. Helens is a great mountain to start with in the Pacific Northwest. Before the eruption St. Helens reached 9,677 feet, and now she is stands at 8,363 feet at the highest place along the rim of the caldera making for an easy day climb. Furthermore. Mt. St. Helens is what climbers refer to as a walk up- there are several easy routes up the south face requiring no technical climbing. All you need to do is put one foot in front of the other.
Of course by “all you need to do” I mean putting yourself on a beautiful, snow covered stair master for roughly five hours hauling your body up a severe incline. I was twenty-eight when I made that ascent, and what I lacked for in conditioning I made up for with impatience. I went with a group of seasoned climbers, and I couldn’t understand at first why they were moving so slowly. Cocky, I pulled ahead, plunging my way up the snowy face. Then, I started to feel my lack of preparation in the thinning air, and I started to take breaks. While the party I was with slowly trudged their way up the face keeping a slow and steady pace, I would bolt ahead, only to later stop to catch my huffing breath. It wasn’t long before my head start gave way to their patient, methodical, seasoned expertise.
One of my friends came along side of me and asked me if I knew what the rest step was. My puzzled face told him I was unfamiliar with it. He explained, showing me how to lock my back leg while easily swinging my other leg forward and then pausing before repeating. Locking the the back leg allows a climber to transfer the weight from her muscles to her skeletal structure, and the slight pause in between steps allows a hiker to rest even while moving forward. At extreme altitudes climbers will sometimes pause 10 seconds or more in between steps. The key is to just keep moving no matter how slow the pace. The rest step allows you to keep this steady pace, rather than the frantic hurrying and stopping, hurrying and stopping I had been doing that wastes so much energy.
It strikes me there’s a similar dynamic when we find ourselves experiencing a difficult season in life. We’re several months into this pandemic now, and I can remember the flurry of activity I saw among my colleagues in the beginning. People were scrambling to adapt and were creating as many ways to help people connect as possible. And at the same time kids were home from school, partners were home from the office, and everything was strange. Life might have been on lock down, but I saw us working nearly twice as hard as we had been. And of course no one can sustain work like this. Predictably, many of us hit the wall weeks or months in and found themselves needed to stop.
When we’re anxious it feels like the most natural thing to do is to speed up to meet whatever challenge is facing us. Anxiety stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system- our heart rate, blood pressure all increase, and our breathing becomes more shallow. But the wiser course, the more sustainable course is to learn how to slow down. When we slow down we give our bodies a chance to adapt. When we slow down we give our bodies the ability to endure. And when we slow down we also give our bodies a chance to enjoy what is taking place all around us- even when we’re in the midst of strange, unprecedented times.
Rest Step When the slope of your life steepens and the heaviness of your body weighs you down, you take one step higher but slide back down into scree, sand or snow. This is no time for hurrying. Now is when you slow your pace downshifting and leaning into the rest step. No wasted motion. No starting and stopping to catch your breath. Just one step and breathe. One step and breathe. Until you finally and slowly make it to the top where the wind howls and blows wanting to push you off the rim, but you stand strong, balanced, and resolute. You suddenly see this is how you have made it through the hardest seasons of your life- making one slow move at a time. Just one step and then breathe.