Today I went to Galyatető with my boyfriend and my parents, to a lovely little hut my father in law has there. Galyatető is a 964 meters high mountain in Hungary, close to to the highest one, which I believe is Kékestető with 1050 meters or so. Hungary is a flat country, so yes, 1050 meters over the level of the sea is considered high.
My father in law bought himself this cozy summer house around two or three years ago, and had invited my parents to go and visit there, since he's spending most of his summer there. The air is clearer and the weather is much milder, thanks mostly to the woods that suround the place.
We talked some there, looked around the house, enjoyed the deck, and then decided to take a walk over to the top of the mountain, roughly one kilometer away, where a stone tower pushes up against the sky to offer a fabulous view above the tops of the trees. To get there, we evidently had to walk some, uphill, and that was a quite steep road. The sun was still hard upon the world, but as we walked I - who normally am not in favor of sports - noted that I'm enjoying the walk quite a lot, and that I have the resistance and the actual desire, to walk faster and take on steeper roads. I haven't done any jogging for a while due to the high temperatures (and because I know myself and I don't want to faint in the middle of the street), but as I walked I thought that I may not know myself so much, that I may not be as weak as I imagine myself to be.
We often tend to distort our capabilities. Sometimes we over estimate our strength, and we think we can take more and more and more, and suddenly we snap under the pressure of a sitaution we have taken on thinking we had the strenght to shoulder. Other times we think we are too weak to do this, or too unprepared to tackle that. And yet still, if we dare, if we are open to ourselves, we can surprise ourselves. Perhaps you have been exercising in order to get slimmer, and you don't realize that maybe you have trained your body, made your muscles stronger and thus now you can do things you couldn't do before. Run faster, run for longer periods of time or longer distances, you can hold up a hard position easier or carry more weight.
Maybe you have been working over and over with numbers, and suddenly you are better at calculating things without whipping out your calculator. There are many things we practice frequently at home, at class, at work, with our friends or in our spare time, and maybe we do it with a given goal in mind, and we feel like we are not getting anywhere because we are comparing ourselves to a given goal or to the rest of the group, but we are not actually checking ourselves in other matters, we don't check our actual advance. Take a language class, for instance: you compare yourself with the best of the class, or you measure yourself with the grades you get, but that doesn't really say much about your actual advance. Say you've been learning Spanish. Maybe you feel that you are the worse student of all, that you know nothing, and that there are students who are far better than you are, get better grades, know all the answers and so, but it isn't until you get to, say, Spain, and you are confronted with the living language, where grammar and knowing the difference between one type of past tense and the other means nothing, that you get to realize actually how much and how well have you learned the language.
Take a moment to think about the ideas you have about yourself, the "trainings" and efforts you do to get this or that, and in that moment, go to the mountain, consider checking yourself to measure exactly how much and how far have you advanced under your own nose, but also to realize your actual limitations. Knowing your capabilities gives you that push you need to keep yourself motivated, after all results are the reason why we commit to a project. But also, knowing your real limits helps you know where you stand, to know where you could work more, or where you want to stop and go on developing another area of your life.
Today, for me, life is like a path in the woods: there is a path, but all over it and around it there are fabulous things and beings you can learn from.
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