It’s easy to forget that this time last week I was where makes me happiest – the mountains – doing the activity that gives me the biggest highs – skiing. Easy, because from those highest of highs, both physical and mental, this has been a really low week. A drag myself through the gutter kind of week: physically hurting from the efforts of skiing, a mid-week football game and too much sitting at the computer in-between; mentally drained by the hamster wheel of work and the million-and-one things of everyday life that normally aren’t an issue but for some reason this week make it hard to think straight and one minute beyond whatever I’m doing.
Thinking back to those days in the mountains carries both joy and more pain: happiness at the memories from there, pain from not being there any longer.
In particular, I dream of Sunday morning. Snow all the previous day and overnight, but now the sky is only blue, the air cold but clear, the mountains appearing bigger than before, bursting with all the fresh snow, ready for the taking. The chairlift ride to the top carries an extra air of excitement: it’s still early, the pistes are perfect – packed snow underneath and a light dusting of fresh powder on top – and empty.
The first run. Fresh tracks to make and to enjoy. A feeling of weightlessness and effortlessness, flicks of the ankles from side to side and let the skis do the work, let them carve graceful arcs across the mountainside, let me float happily this way and that, no more than 30 seconds of sheer bliss, one of those few moments in life when everything perfectly falls into place.
Up there, that empty playground is one of the few places where I can completely lose myself. There’s no time to think of anything but where I am – floating on dunes of glittering powdered crystals – and the next turn. There’s no space for unwanted thoughts of work or school, nor anything that can trigger the pressure in my head that’s my companion too often.
From that to yesterday, the contrast couldn’t be bigger. I want to walk but my body is hurting all over: shoulder, back, knees, feet. Each step is a slog; I feel as though I’m carrying double my weight. There’s no joy from my surroundings, even though the sun is warm, the colours are deep and I’m walking down a track that’s given me plenty of happiness and inspiration before.
Bits of the path feel endless, corners or turns that don’t seem to be getting any closer no matter how long I’ve been walking for, until I’m suddenly there, right on top of them. Skiing, the runs end too quickly, the 10 minutes sat on the chairlift back to the top go too slowly, indifferent to my impatience to get going again.
The crowds in London don’t help either. I don’t remember the city feeling this full before, or perhaps it’s because this is the first time I’ve truly worked in central London and it is always this way. Walking becomes an exercise in ski slalom, a swerve one way and then the other to avoid those coming towards me, consumed by their inanities of investment strategies here, deep diving on this topic there. I feel lost, out of place, no interest in that world of money and self-importance, no sliver of grimly bristly moustache to fit in with the latest trends.
Up there, I’m also lost: a speck in a giant landscape, just like the other skiers who appear like little bugs in different parts of the mountains, present one moment and gone the next, and wrapped up by a silence only occasionally punctuated by a busy burst of wind or the occasional blast from an overly-zealous DJ at a mountainside bar. Give me a choice between lost there and lost in the city, I know which one I’d take every time.
I know the lows of this week will pass. My mind and body will recover. I’ll slip back into the work routine, find ways to pretend I give a shit about this and that for a little longer. But oh I wish it could be different sometimes; how I could somehow bottle those mountain-top highs, not just as a memory but something to hit again and again. One day soon, I promise myself, I’ll take the plunge.