Adjacent Possible: Love is a Hike

In March 2017, our family of six moved from a small village outside Paris into a tiny cottage bordering a cemetery at the foot of the Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart) cathedral in Montmartre. It was a thrilling decision, one that would aid us many times in remembering the existence and brilliance of the adjacent possible—the fact that alternate realities are always hovering on our current one. Even though it was a brutal unplugging (rental contract, schools, fledgling friendships in France) and required a lot of courage, exhaustion and expense, it was a euphoric feeling to exit the life that wasn’t working for an option we hadn’t seen because it felt unadjacent and impossible. 

I recently found a journal entry from those first euphoric days in Paris, my writing filled with astonishment at our crossing to a life that immediately soothed and solved so many challenges we felt would require an early forfeiture of living abroad. The most curious thing I wrote about was an oath to live a sort of “Reverse Tarzan” life. Rather than dutifully trying to learn and do exactly the customary thing according to the rules of others, I would actively seek to follow my gut instinct and craving for what I felt was true or important. For what I loved.  

There is something gorgeous about this planet and the non-human living things on it (plants, animals), that human living things seem to have forgotten: there are myriad possibilities but also limits. In the hustle and quickening automation of our lives we are taking for granted the things we love, trying to maneuver around the inconvenience of the human and planetary limits. In a world of increasing uncertainty, we like to force or feign certainty however we can. 

And yet, even when so much is out of our control there is always an ‘adjacent possible’ that may soothe or solve some of the challenges we are facing. Everything we are doing, how we are doing it, who we are doing it with, why and where could shift in some way. Since being on earth means being here with others, a good place to envision a more compelling possibility is in our relationships.

My experience of being in relation to others involves being the fourth of eight kids, a life partner to Nathan for the past 28 years, and a mother of four kids. Mothering has won my most important effort and has been my life’s work for the past 27 years. Since Nathan and I like traditions and marking big life transitions, we both agreed the end of full-time parent mode deserved something epic. So, five years ago, we started preparing to become “open nesters” (a term that describes the situation better than an empty one since kids do come and go many times if we are lucky, if we are lucky.) 

We made lists of potential adventures that often diverged down different paths but both agreed on a mutual curiosity about the Tour of Mont Blanc, a 170 km hiking trail that encircles the gorgeous mountain chain passing through three countries beginning and ending in Chamonix, France. A favorite niche bookstore,The Librairie des Alpes, had planted that seed since we didn’t even know the hike existed before our visit to its tiny two aisle galley crammed with art work and photographs of mountains and mountain lovers. We bought a couple guidebooks and put them in prominent places so that we could remember to dream and also to prepare for a time coming that would be so unlike the one we were currently in: junior high, high school, book writing, COVID. 

Quickly the guidebooks became fixtures, oft-time coasters. Five years flew by and our sense of friendship waned, even as we started working more together.

Unlike the fairytale happily-ever-after spiel, love takes work. We recently read a brilliant manifesto that explains why. Written by Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving holds a vital insight for all humans everywhere about what love really is: less a falling into, magical, fated thing and more an “active power” like any creative endeavor, focused on giving. Requiring discipline and skill, real love includes care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.

What we really wanted underneath the historic, charming, and at times daring ramble was to experience the simplicity of being alive, in nature, with each other, no distractions. Beyond the mandate that our legs (our knees, really) both climb and descend 1000 meters each day, we were free to discover a pace and the shape of what open nest would mean for our love story. We both knew we urgently needed a more robust partnership—equal but different, as systems scientist and futurist Riane Eisler calls it. Having been born and raised in an extremely patriarchal worldview we still bump into “vertical” situations where I play best supporting actress to Nathan’s wage-earning and career-defining pursuits. 

Of course, my plea for partnership has always been more urgent than his; any transformation of any broken system is always craved in relation to how much of an underdog you are. The politeness of women, whether innate or conditioned, has often been the bellows to our own undoing. 

The mountains felt like a place we could be equal in. And they were. We re-found our pace of friendship in a shared daily focus: to climb, to be grateful for the beauty around us, to learn about ourselves and each other, to be helpful and kind to fellow hikers. There wasn’t much else to decide with poor or no wifi signal and packed lunches except for a few days when you could dine on amazing mountain food served by friendly tanned folks. 

The most shocking revelation about the TMB was that everything depended on the weather. It could block one of the stages from your experience, unless you wanted to risk it, hike anyway, and die like someone did the day before we started. The weather might allow you to hike but hide every single vista behind clouds so opaque and yet so ethereal that one minute you could barely see the trail in front of you and then a sudden gust would pull back the cloudy curtain to reveal stunning toothy peaks in the distance or a lush hillside to your left with swathes of wild blueberry bushes. 

Love and weather ruled the day and only one of them was partially within our control.

Nathan kept doing this endearing thing where he would take photos of solo hikers and then share them when we caught up at the next hut. It was the dad in him. Each time, when he asked for their email addresses, their eyes sparkled with gratitude. A small gesture with grand dimensions. We have stunning photos, hilarious selfies, and pathetic attempts to film clips of us talking about what we were learning or how the upside tools were revealing themselves to us or being required of us. Still, old patterns showed up that neither of us liked and we wrestled around their occurrence with tender care towards untangling from them. 

Strangely, the best place to train for the TMB in Paris is Montmartre since it’s the most significant hill in Paris. There are dozens of steep and long staircases zigzagging its top and sides and we went several times just before the hike. Once we even passed the cemetery and cottage we arrived at seven years ago when we jumped for the adjacent possibility of living in Paris. Without speaking, we held a moment of reverence for both the work and the weather we’ve endured since then. It has been a hike with an incline so intense we have needed to catch our breath several times. But the parting of thick clouds is more real than ever. 

Sitting from a tiny rental in downtown Oxford where Nathan is spending part of our sabbatical, (it’s really mine too since my willingness to perform the “care” work which supported and made possible the focus and tenacity his career demanded) I can see how this new partnership might not have happened. Under the guise of pursuing things that feel more urgent or rewarding, there are adjacent possibles that corrode. Adjacent possibles that dismantle things we love. And while we can’t choose how others love us, our ability to love well will require uphill climbs under difficult conditions.

Joyful realities are made possible by repeated small steps with snatches of gorgeous vistas along the way that provide courage and motivation to get back up and hike another day. It may take a Reverse Tarzan oath: to trust your own gut, to follow what you feel is true, to hike towards what you love.

At the end of the tour, back in Chamonix, France