October 19th 2024
I’ve been thinking about the following quote and even stickers of it made because I liked it so much.
What you think is what you become. What you feel is what you attract. What you imagine is what you create.
This is a great quote, because it captures the cascading nature of these concepts; your beliefs as a driver for your thinking, and your thinking as a driver of your feelings. While you can have an optimistic psychological style and still feel bad some days, your beliefs and approach to life will determine whether your hardships become opportunities. I’ll note that it is great to be honest about your feelings, bad or good. You should be grateful for days when you feel fantastic because feeling fantastic is in itself a gift. When you’re feeling bad, be comfortable with the fact that you feel bad. Because similar to good things happen to happy people, bad stuff tends to come up around unhappy people.
The final thought I had before heading out onto the trail was about planning ahead. To achieve most things, it helps to have a plan. Without a plan, there’s a panorama of possible paths you can take to reach whatever thing you’re aiming to achieve. But with a little vision, and a little focus, you’ll probably get going in the right direction. Furthermore, with a little planning, you might even find a little trail that other people have already created. Otherwise you might’ve been bushwhacking, navigating steep slopes and sleeping outside. You’ll get to where you’re going, but you may need to endure some excess hardship.
All that to say, I think I felt good about the upcoming trail run and have a good vision of where I was going, and how’d I feel getting up there. By that point I had delayed enough and was probably a little hesitant to get started. So I thought I’d better get at it.
The weather was overcast and about 60 degrees, almost perfect weather for a trail run. The trail was very well defined and easy to jog up. I’d reached the Teneriffe junction after about 12 minutes and was on the steep, less defined portion of the trail by about 45 minutes. I even passed a group of trailrunners with Mountaineers on the way up. I actually knew who they were because I had requested to join their party but was declined because I didn’t have a strava or a Backcountry Running badge (Mountaineers thing).
Approaching the Teneriffe summit, it was as if I’d swam up through the fog. I even had a thought that in general, things and people tend to move through air, much like fish and things move through water. They share similar hydrodynamic properties. A fish that swims and comes into contact with more water will also tend to find more food. Similarly humans, might do well finding more opportunities by moving about and running into new connections, ideas and thoughts.
There was a light bout of rain around noon, but otherwise the weather was perfect. The rocks going over the haystack on Mt. Si required extra attention since they were wet. Once on the Mt. Si trail, I missed the turn-off back to Mt. Tenerife. As a result, I ran an extra.5 miles with some additional elevation. I knew I had the other half of my safeway breakfast burrito in the car, so the extra mileage zapped the last of my energy, making the whole thing worth. Will certainly back doing this route again. I’ll also record the run correctly in Strava, since I didn’t know it Strava and Gaia don’t connect.
Stragenly enough I only took photos of this mushroom on the hike.
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