What you’ve done passes into the past. Each peak summoned is at some point soon after followed by the sheer cliff face of another climb that promises another peak, unseeable through the clouds above. No matter how many times you get through, there is no final stage of gotten through, made it, finished. There is only more getting through. Which is where I suppose the eastern stuff comes in. About it not being about the end. It’s about the journey. The journey is the reward—my girlfriend’s friend has a tattoo of this. I’ve tasted this peace before. Not as deeply as a veteran yogi. But I’ve tasted enough to at least know it’s there. But it still seems inhuman. Like an escape more than a solution. Everything we are is designed for the striving. For the satisfying of hunger that only begins to pang again not long after satisfaction. This is how we keep moving forward. Otherwise we might be very sedentary creatures. Completely idle even. Or we might have nobler incentives. Ideals of a higher form than bare physical needs that would drive us on. For now, most of our nobler motives seem to be just the base physical needs dressed up in fancy packaging based on our cultural or societal situation of the time, which really just regresses back to our base needs of safety and belonging.