by Mike O’Mary

One summer, a friend took me hiking up 9,000-foot-high Decker Peak in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. The experience provided me with a strong sense of accomplishment, and the solitude, the view and the cleansing effort it took all combined to make the world seem less complex. At that moment, it seemed that it might, in fact, be possible for us to control our own fates.

When you descend from the Sawtooths, you can follow the stream beds down until they take you to a lake at the base of the mountains, or you can go sidehill around the mountain until you are above the lake, then head straight down. We decided on the latter.

We made good time until we came to some steep, vertical strips of decomposed granite, nature’s equivalent of silicone-coated marbles. Each strip was 20 yards across and stretched from the granite peak above us to as far down the mountain as we could see.

Crossing the strips required constant motion because as soon as you put a foot down, the granite started to slide down the mountain. The only way to avoid going down with it was to keep moving. We went sidehill on loose gravel for the next few hours until we were off the mountain.

I often think about that hike because when you’re a kid, you don’t control your own fate, but you temper that knowledge with the thought that someday, you’re going to grow up and the world will be your oyster. But the older you get, the more you realize most of us are just a bunch of big kids. We do adult things–we work, we make house payments, we pay taxes–but control is an illusory thing. It’s like running sidehill on loose gravel. In the end, people seem much happier when they stop pursuing control and start seeking meaning…because at that point, you begin to establish a foothold on solid ground.

Mike O’Mary is founding dreamer of Dream of Things, an independent book publisher currently accepting creative nonfiction stories for anthologies on 15 topics, including an anthology titled “Cubicle Stories: Life in the Modern Workplace.”