After climbing up a whole mountain I was hoping for a certain cliche to appear before me. Actually, I was praying for that cliche, longing for it! Which is dangerous, as cliches are the core of bad writing and sloppy thinking. But that mountain we walked up was huge, man! I mean it was a real mountain, an official mountain made official by the Mountain Measuring people! And this wasn’t a gentle slope covered in moss and daffodils. This bugger was rocky and foggy and sheep-y and windy. And now, my mountain being travassed, I wanted to slide down that easy trail of candy canes, gilly flowers and happy walkin’ that comes with sliding down instead of trudging up; you know, like in The Sound of Music and all those songs I sang in the Boy Scouts. Val-Do-Ree, Val do Rah, Baby!

The cliche I wanted to be true was “It’s easier coming down”.

Did it happen for me, Jonathan?

Yeah, coming down the mountain is a actually major pain in the ass, the foot and mind. The trail taking you off the Pyrenees has sections that are composed of shale stone which has been shattered and sharpened by the elements into a path that resembles a road of huge stone knives, blades up, and we have to walk down and through them And, of course, it rained, so the stone-knife paths were also slick with mud. When we were walking up the mountain, we just trudged, we plodded. We moved along almost mindlessly only having to concern ourselves with putting one foot in front of the other. Here, you had to pay attention where every footfall was going. That mindless uphill plodding would cost you at least a bloody knee or more likely a fall down the slope that didn’t have much to stop your fleshy body except nature’s own Ginsu knives jutting towards heaven. Constantly having to negotiate where to put your feet is as exhausting as the walking itself; this was an interesting discovery. Further proof that constant thought can be as exhausting as constant physical motion.

Now, I don’t want to misrepresent, the path had many lovely stretches unbesmirched with dangerous passages. And I will talk about those later, but between all those nice parts was the glaring Camino Leccion we all learned: Coming Down is harder.

And then I thought about my own struggles with addiction, and my friends and family who had struggled with similar demons. Coming down is not only harder, in fact Coming Down, is the only thing that matters.

I would even say that coming down the mountain is more important than getting to the top. Yeah, that’s tight, man! I typed that! Think about it. First of all who gives a shit where you’ve been if you can’t tell them all about it, right? So getting back is at least half of it. But it’s the most important half. Consider this: You go and do this amazing thing, huzzah. You’re great. But on the way back you slip on a sheep’s turd, fall into a crevasse and die. That automatically makes you a schmuck. It would be better if you died on the way up, because at least you wouldn’t have ‘Wasted’ a huge amount of effort just to go splat at the bottom of a hole. Nothing mars the honor of an assent nobly attempted, but a descent screwed up can rob you of all the glory attained at the assent.

It reminded me about the stories a friend would tell me about recovery from substance abuse. She worked in a private Psych hospital, and saw folks falling off that mountain a lot. My own experience is similar. When it comes to addiction, it’s not the Quitting, it’s the Keeping On Quitting. And that’s every day, every damn day, jack. Every good day, every bad day, every old friend offering you a hit, every boss yelling at you, every traffic jam, every disappointed wife looking at you and asking why you don’t have more money, every tingle of the skin that sings to you about how good it felt when, how better it felt when, how easy it is to……

Lots of knives, stone knives, with the edges up. But’s still better than living high…

But every step matters. We have to think on every footfall, and that’s exhausting, so here’s a last song from us, the nigh ruined, to those who see us falter.

We sure would appreciate it. Buen camino, y’all.