Climbing The Mountain

Network Marketing Training

There’s a lesson to be learned when we listen closely to those we share our lives with…

I’m about to share something with you; a lesson about life, the road to success and the choices we make along the way.

Leave me your thoughts…

In the ‘Shadow of Seefin’ there’s a small fishing village by the name of Kilcrohane, the last coastal village in West Cork, Ireland before you land in The Atlantic Ocean. It’s a small and secluded spot famed for it’s Summer festival, two pubs, wine bar and self-serve Hostel where travellers come each year to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy The Craic.

Today I climbed the mountain there that overlooks the town like an old school headmaster…

Okay, it may seem like a small hill to some but to me and my eight year old son (my climbing companion for the day) it was a mountain and one which taught me a valuable lesson.

I’ll get to the lesson shortly but before I do let me explain the history of Kilcrohane to help you understand how this story comes together and how my lesson unfolds.

For those who enjoy a little bit of Irish history, you’ll know that place names have a meaning of some sort and are often named after a person or an event that took place there.

Cill Crochain means Church of Crochan in gaelic. Crohain himself is said to have lived around the time of St.Patrick but other than that, little else is known of him. Today, the village carries two names, the English and Gaelic but while one has a history going back to the 5th Century, the other is still staking it’s claim for fame as it were.

We often come out this way to find a spot to picnic or watch the seals playing on the rocks offshore and each time we do, my son will suggest we climb the mountain overlooking the village. So, today we did.

Now, let me say right at the start, I’m no mountain climber. In fact, the last time I was even close to a pair of climbing boots my wife told me I was turning into an anorak and threatened me with divorce so climbing mountains and more to the point being dressed for the journey ahead isn’t top of my agenda on a Sunday morning.

So, we arrived at the foot of the mountain around lunchtime, parked the Toyota at Base camp and threw on our coats before making a decision on which route we would take, opting to tackle the North Face as opposed to walking around the outside for the next six or seven hours.

We set off…

Now, like a lot of things in life, climbing the BIG hill (okay maybe it isn’t a mountain) is not quite as easy as it first seems.

I had the wrong shoes on for climbing. I had no food and nothing to drink and to add pain to injury, black clouds were gathering on the horizon, threatening rain and a whole lot more. Climbing was beginning to look like just another bad parenting decision to add to the many I have made.

After an hour or so, we took a break and sat down on a couple of rocks. The view looking back down on where we had come from was incredible. Our car looked tiny and almost unrecognisable and the path we had taken to get that far was difficult to make out even though we had only just made it.

As I looked up at the remainder of the hill I had that feeling you get sometimes when you just want to give up and go home and I heard a small voice in the back of my head say “It’s much easier to go back from here. If you go all the way up to the top it’s going to take another three or four hours, maybe more..”

“What do you think fella?” I asked my son, ” Should we go back. We’ve come a good way for today”

Here’s where the lesson started…

My son turned to me and like only an eight year old could do he looked me in the eye and said… “Dad, what’s the point in climbing a mountain if you don’t want to get to the top?”

And he was right.

So we climbed it. You can see the two of us pictured below, having made it all the way to the top of our very own mountain:

On the way back down, my son turned to me and asked me how old I was when I climbed my first mountain…

“43″ I said.

“But aren’t you 43 today Dad?” he asked.

“I am” I told him “you and I climbed our first mountain together son. Isn’t that cool”

It’s easy to give up. It’s easy to walk away and go home. It’s much easier to turn away from the mountain than climb it. You can’t change history but you can make it.

And if you want to change your circumstances and reach your goals, sometimes you have to listen to that eight year old voice inside of you that sees life as it should be…

A journey to make with those you believe in.

A story to share with people you love.

An adventure to take hold of and make your own.