Ash Dykes - Crossing the Yangtze River.

We all have our journey. The toughest one is no doubt life, where we take centrestage, where we are judged by our performance. 

In Life section of ST, adventurer Ash Dykes, 29, shares his journey of trekking the entire length of China’s Yangtze River. It is has been made into a two-part documentary that airs tonight at 9 pm on National Geographic.

This journey is daunting. It took Ash 353 days to complete a distance of 6,437km last year. It was a Guinness World Record feat no less. 

Ash said: “The river cuts through immense diversity - it would take me through 11 provinces, show me both the wild and urban sides of China, and lots of traditions, cultures, dialects, wildlife and weather systems along the way.”

Ash shared that it took him and his team two years to plan the route. The logistics was equally daunting, and the intense preparation was essential due to the political sensitivity. 

He said: “The source of the Yangtze is close to Tibet and you need special permits that are difficult even for locals to get.”

“Then one has to contend with landslides, bears, wolves and the altitude, which is about the same height as Mount Everest base camp, so just over 5,400m.”

He added: “In winter, it can drop to minus 40 deg C and you get blizzards. And it’s just so wild.”

Ash said that what he had learned is perseverance. And it was perseverance in the smallest task, even the most mundance ones. And this is how he broke them down. 

“On day one, when I had so many struggles even getting there and I still had 352 days left, it was important not to look at the end goal and let that overwhelm me, but to focus on breaking it down into lots of little sections to make it more achievable and make sure I’m managing my expectations.”

That is the avalanche of a life plunging all at once on us - turning a daunting moment into a lifetime’s burden. 

I recall a friend who once told me that when you climb a mountain, there is no point looking either up or down. When there is still a long way to go, and when you have come so far up, he said just focus on every grip you have on the rocks. 

Look for the crevices for support. Focus on how to scale each small step that takes you forward. It is the daily task that adds up. They are the anonymous (seemingly inconsequential) steps that bring you up to the summit.

I also recall a saying that God is gracious with us by creating time. One that is spread out over a lifetime. Each second carries a moment and no more. And each minute carries sixty of those moments. 

Our life is thus not designed to pack every pain, sorrow, shock or trial into one moment and turn that moment into a boulder we carry for a major part of our journey. When we make that happen, that moment becomes unforgettable, and it also becomes overwhelming. 

Soon, it also becomes a dead weight, which sinks us deep like an anchor that drowns our resolve to move forward, and to savour what the other moments in life have in store for us. 

And soon, it also becomes a point of reference, an emotional benchmark, where we see all things through it; thereby turning even hope into a dreaded dead end. 

They say you take the color of your surrounding, and becomes the hue of the choice you make. That applies to a weighted moment too, where we compact it with the shock of a trauma or trial at that moment it happened. We too become that moment as it defines our present and discolourises our future. 

Alas, one defining moment, especially the bad, and it controls all other moments in our life and make them either invisible or truly inconsequential. 

So, I return to Ash, the adventurer, who practically took one step at a time to surmount the challenges he had to confront. His was the Yangtze River, the journey of great endurance and perseverance. 

Ours may be an event that happened to us in the past or a sorrow that has stopped us in our track or trek. Such moment of pain or fear is never meant or designed to stop time. For in time, God has given us a lifetime to spread the event however daunting (or crushing) it may be. 

Let the burden be shared (or spread) as we take each step affirming our healing and towards restoring our faith and hope in this journey that is given unto us for a season. That is, a season meant for overcoming, and a season meant for rejoicing as we finally reach the summit to savour the empowering view, including the view of what we had once overcome below, that is, those moments that once threatened to halt our journey, but we moved forward nevertheless, one moment at a time. 

Indeed, at that vantage point, those moments become exceedingly small and truly inconsequential in the larger scheme of life itself.

 

Relish each day: the miracle of existence.

Gary Hayden has written a beautiful piece about the "miracle of existence". He is a philosophy and science writer and recently went to Shukkei-en Gardens in Hiroshima to experience the cascading wonders of cherry blossoms.

He saw a little girl blowing bubbles and enjoying herself in the pink blossom garden. Caught in that bubble of wonder, he was reminded of what a 14th-century monk Yoshida Kenko wrote: "If our life did not fade and vanish...but lingered on for ever, how little the world would move us. It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful."

Kenko also observed that "if cherry blossom lasted forever, they would lose much of their power to move us."

Lesson? Just one. I guess too much of a good thing is just too much. I always go on a vacation and dread the first part. I call it the inchoate anxiety. It is the part about the start of the vacation. The packing up to go, the waiting for the flight, and the checking into a hotel on the first day.

Why? Because every start has an end. It's like picking up one end of the stick, and you begrudgingly pick up its end. So going on a long break is like that. You start it off on the first day and every minute thereafter brings you closer to the end. And when the end comes, you wish you could start all over. The nostalgia can be chokingly sentimental. And the recalling can be cripplingly poignant.

It is the same with the kids. At times, when they are at their most irresistible, you wish the moment would last forever. You wish time would freeze and you could replay it all at will. You wish they would never grow up. But they do. Good times come and go. That is what makes them good times, isn't it?

The holiday will end. The kids will grow up. And I will grow old. Life will come full circle to be reconciled endearingly with death. That's the miracle of existence. It is not a long drawn out bad dream. Neither is it an everlasting fantasy. It is on the contrary the experiences of change that makes it an enduring miracle.

Gary quoted Kenko with this insight: "What a glorious luxury it is to taste life to the full for even a single year. If you constantly regret life's passing, even a thousand long years will seem but the dream of a night."

If the holiday never ends and the kids don't grow up, the miracle becomes an uneventful lull. We therefore shortchange ourselves with the rich diversity of experiences - whether good or challenging - for a mundane lifetime of cherry blossoming.

You see, every period of our life we live through, that is, the youth, the career, the marriage, the family, the kids' graduation, the old age, and the mortal beckoning, all bring about enriching growth and maturity. The highs and lows of life thus do not exist in isolation. They are in fact intimately connected, inseparable even.

Weekends do not come without weekdays. Or Saturdays do not come without Mondays. We therefore should not only thank God it's Friday but also be grateful for Mondays for the simplest reason that if every day is Friday, we will be forced to live in the rut of a miracle stillborn and not the full spectrum of a miracle deeply savored. Every day therefore comes with its own flowing purpose.

I guess Kenko was right with this, "if people hate death, they should love life." And in the same vein, if we hate monotony, we should love diversity. If we hate stagnation, we should love growth. And if we hate aimlessness, shouldn't we love Mondays?

Let me end with Kenko here: "Should we not relish each day the joy of survival? Fools forget this - they go striving after other enjoyments, cease to appreciate the fortune they have and risk all to lay their hands on fresh wealth." Cheerz