Below my feet was the highest peak in all of mainland United States. Around me were some of the most breath-taking views I’d ever witnessed. At that altitude, my chest was filled less with oxygen and more with the pride of reaching there. Yes, I’ve made it! Top of the world, well, sort of! Along with six other buddies, I had managed to scale Mount Whitney by foot. As we began the journey to the base I thought, “The hardest part is over, if I’ve made it this far to the summit then downhill is a cakewalk”.

Big mistake!

A capture during the ascent to summit (Mt.Whitney, California)

Halfway into the downhill trek, as we were packing our stuff at the campsite, all of a sudden, we were struck by a thunderstorm (something whose likeliness was predicted to be a mere 20% by weather reports earlier). Up above you are dense unforgiving clouds – and fear strikes in your heart about the deadly lightning strikes. You look around for a shelter, but there’s hardly any;  you’re tempted to run to the nearest tree, but you realize that trees are the worst shelter during lightning.  The rain isn’t stopping – waiting there for too long would leave you in the darkness which can be dangerous, but also continuing to walk makes you more vulnerable to lightning in open areas, and running is almost certain to make you fall due to slippery wet rocks. Whatever decision you make can possibly go wrong. Our brains were running out of options. We decided to stay put and endure the storm for a while inside our half-intact tent. Fortunately, after a heavy downpour, the rain gods appeared to take a short timeout. That, that was the window we exactly wanted. We packed the bare essentials, left behind the tent that was drenched in icy water, and made a quick move from there. We walked the way back to the trailhead like there was no tomorrow (because there was actually a very good chance of us not having a tomorrow). To our great fortune, we didn’t encounter any more rains until we finished our journey, and we all made it back home in one piece.

In the book “The Defining Decade”, author Meg Jay mentions a sign at the Rocky Mountains that says – ‘Mountains Don’t Care’. It is to make hikers aware of how indifferent the nature can be to you. When you are stuck in a wrong place at a wrong time, it doesn’t matter if you intended to get down earlier, or if you have a successful track record in previous hikes, or if you are a really nice person. The author says that adulthood is a very similar experience and should come with the same warning, especially life in the twenties. When you turn 18 you get a snobbish feeling that you are now an adult and you have reached the peak of life, and everything is smooth sailing from here on. But come twenties, real adulthood hits you like an unexpected thunderstorm. You have an overwhelmingly lot of things to take care of and loads of important decisions to make – what career you choose, which city you want to live in, whom to choose as a life partner, what kind of friends you make, where to invest your money – and tons of options for all of these. On the face of it, the freedom of choice seems empowering, but we also soon realize that we are entirely responsible for the consequences of those choices. What looks like a smooth path from far away soon turns out be a rocky path of responsibilities when you come closer. And with every step we take, we’ll be in a constant fear of getting struck by the lightning of failure – whether it’s a terrible career situation or a toxic relationship or a financial sinkhole; all this while a dark cloud of financial obligations looms over you, constantly hitting you with hailstones of debts, bills, and taxes.

Of late, a frequent theme in many of my conversations with peers of the same age group is how much of a sham this whole adulthood is, and how we were all tricked into believing that adult life is rosy where everything is sorted out by default. Nobody warned us that it would be like this! Nobody gave us a user manual for life when we got out of college! Nobody told us that life was much easier as kids! Maybe we are all really imposters, just cluelessly screaming kids hiding behind the façade of the sophisticated adult image that we project!

But after all that cribbing, when I look back and introspect there has been a growing sense of realization about the whole perception of adulthood. The entire journey through the twenties has been a valuable learning experience – a mindset morphing one indeed. It was moving from a mindset that assumes things to be alright by default to a mindset of taking responsibility to make it alright. Drawing parallels with that particular hiking adventure, it was finding out that sometimes waiting patiently is pragmatic while sometimes jumping into action is; it was realizing that you may have to leave certain things behind if you have to move forward – whether it’s an icy tent or a long-held notion or an unpleasant memory of the past; and it was also understanding that staying with your pack and having each other’s back goes a long way.

Perhaps adulthood is not a stage where everything is in order – the chaos remains for life anyway, but adulthood is about being more experienced with the chaos, and the silent confidence arising out of that experience that you can figure things out in the next chaotic situation, just like you’ve figured out in the ones before this.

At the end of the journey each person has their own story, a fear that was overcome, a lesson that was learnt, an assumption that was proved wrong, a myth that was shattered, and, a wiser and a more thankful person coming out of it all. In the end, whether you appreciated the journey or not, whether you came out stronger or not, whether you made it in one piece or not, the mountains don’t care, or this case the world doesn’t care, only we ourselves have to – and the realization of that, or rather the internalization of that idea is perhaps what adulthood is really about.

P.S.: I imagine that when I turn 50 I’ll probably look back at this article and think how ‘cute’ this was. Maybe at that point I’d realize that all I said and discovered till the time of this article was merely the tip of the adulthood iceberg? I guess I’ll find out..