The past few weeks I’ve been working on my year-end goals review/year-beginning planning. We’ve been out near Lake Tahoe for the past few days, so it’s gotten me started thinking about getting serious about hiking the 173 miles long Tahoe Rim Trail this coming September. It’s been staring sideways at me for a couple of years now. I pretend to take the thought seriously, like, “Yeah, I’m sooo gonna’ do that!” But, other than buying a Nat Geo topo map of the Lake Tahoe Basin and the Tahoe Rim Trail guide, by Tim Hauserman, and picking up a few trail head maps, a couple of years back, there’s not been any real movement on this venture.
I’ve also been thinking about the misogi concept – it tickles my imagination every year or so. I read about it in an blog post over at The Adventure Couple, Misogi: Learning to do the Impossible at http://www.live-adventurously.com/misogi-learning-impossible/
As I understand it, the practice of misogi is about setting yourself a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, one that is not only supposed to stretch your comfort zone, but is designed to pretty much blow it out. One of the criteria for setting the goal is that it be such a reach that there’s approximately 50% chance of failure to hit it – my guess is that helps to place it in the Goldilocks “just right” zone for pushing yourself to new heights, thereby massively resetting your own personal idea of what you’re actually capable of accomplishing with your life.
So, on a day off from hitting the ski slopes, I thought it would be fun to drag out the book and map, pull up a couple of websites from the Tahoe Rim Trail Association, run the whole idea through some viability questions, and see where I stand on this – I decided it was time to either commit, or don’t-commit, and stop letting the fantasy take up valuable head space.
I have to say, after just 20 minutes of poking around, the thought had my mind spinning – seriously, 173 miles!?!? Bears! Cougars! And, 25 miles of rugged, strenuous hiking through the DESOLATION National Wilderness (this by itself sounds daunting)?!? All this, for a gal who has only ever tackled 5-7 mile day hikes!
How can I have this level of angst, terror, sitting in the warmth and security of my…. timeshare!! Lol, well, I figure that’s what breathing is for. I force myself to get used to just breathing through the idea of doing it!! I’ve assigned myself this baby step sized task of just breathing, in and out. Why? Because this is what the notion of “competence leads to confidence leads to competence” is all about… accumulating baby steps… working smarter-not-harder… and ultimately, unleashing your vast potential, one tiny, heroic act at a time! 😊
Smarter-Not-Harder U 