It’s Monday night here, Labor Day, and I’m watching this show on The Discovery Channel about Mark Inglis, the first double amputee to summit Mount Everest.
They just showed him coming down from the summit, where he passed the bodies of 200 other climbers who died on the mountain. Now he’s being helped down to base camp by his teammates; he can no longer use his prosthetic legs because his stumps are too frostbitten and raw from the summit climb. One member of the team is actually carrying Mark down the mountain on his back.
Holy crap.
I’m watching this and I’m thinking two things:
- I’m perfectly happy never climbing Mount Everest.
- Why the hell should I ever be afraid of writing?
Because truth is, sometimes I get really afraid of writing. What am I afraid of exactly? Meh. I don’t know. Lots of things. Failure. Rejection. Success. You know. That stuff.
But come on. It’s just writing. It’s not climbing Mount Everest.
Some of you will say, “Yeah, but writing a novel sure feels like climbing a big, scary mountain.”
OK, fine. But you can still feel your feet, right? And my guess is you aren’t suffering altitude blindness either.
Watching this show gave my perspective a good swift kick in the pants.
It’s just writing.