One summer, my boyfriend and I hiked three miles into the High Sierras to Skelton Lake—or, as I first heard it, “Skeleton Lake.” The trail switch-backed through pine-needle-carpeted rock gardens. As we approached the 9,000 ft. elevation mark, trees shrunk from prehistoric heights to struggling shrubs. We are surviving beyond the tree-line, I thought to myself, somewhat self-conscious of the human impulse to grow bigger, stronger and further than mother nature. With jubilant limbs, and our lithe white shepherd, we Godzilla-ed across struggling cities of ants, and broke the pathways of flighty chipmunks.

Eventually, the sweep of hidden rivers quieted and calmed into a glass-still meadow. Skelton Lake was crowned by snow-clothed peaks, its shores bejeweled by small, smooth boulders—each one mossed by the terry cloth towel of a hiker.

I dropped my pack in the shade of a pine, shed the skins of spandex, and inched into the placid blue. But the heat of August screamed against the cold of mountain water, emitting a muffled squeal from behind my bitten lips. I dug my nails into my palms as if I could crush the cold, and watched as my thighs and calves whitened to numbness.

After a series of slow-moving, craven negotiations with pain, I thought of my water-loving sister, Eve. She would have let the lake swallow her in one smooth gulp; she would have welcomed the pain of cold, as if it were extinguishing something burning inside; would have handed the weight of her body over to the body of water like a fair trade.

I now stood halfway submerged, arms wrapped around my chest, hugging dryness goodbye. I sent a wistful glance back to my co-adventurer ashore, then leapt forward with Eve. We fell into the breast stroke—the easiest stroke to keep our heads above water, back arched into a cobra curve, legs out-turned in lotus—and surged like this until we propelled past the turquoise shallows into the slate green deeps.

Beneath and around, darkness spread, so that my initial leap of faith suddenly extended into every stroke, a blind trusting all the way through. I forgot Eve and found again the weight of my legs, as boats find their anchors, pulling me down to the unctuous algae-bed below. It occurred to me that behind the name “Skelton Lake,” and perhaps reaching up beneath my limbs, was a sunken horror story, another body’s failure to do what I’d set out to do. I uprighted my stroke into a stationary wiggle, contemplating a premature return.

Then, as often happens in moments of extreme sensation, a strange poetic pressure transformed what I was doing into something more than what I was doing. I felt how bottomless human fear could be and, in turn, how limited my ability was to control the things that scared me. In this internal fugue of realizations, I also felt how these proportions would never change; how my whole life ahead might as well be this lake, and I, the swimmer deciding whether to go on or turn back.

At that, I slammed the thought of skeletons away—not because these stories didn’t exist, but because telling them now would haunt and halt my own—and flipped my amphibian body upside-down to gaze at the clouded sky. There I stayed on my back, grabbing hold of my heart rate with slow breaths, giving a kick when floating became sinking; a sigh when my heart, now exposed, reached its height. I imagined my sister’s body beside mine, we like two marine mammals mastering the art of sinking and floating, a dance between the heaviness and buoyancy of being alive.

“Wow, she’s brave!” I heard someone say on the beach.

In a stilted breath, I replied, “With these sorts of things, yes.”

Sinking back into the insulated silence, I wondered what would happen if I lived my life like this; if every day I left my numb legs in the shallows and sought equilibrium—with other brave swimmers—in the depths.

. . .

For each emotional environment I’ve “braved” during quarantine, I’ve sought an outer environment to contain it. Last week I hiked up Mammoth and pretended that everything I feared swam inside the circumference of a lake—I bucked up and made the plucky plunge.

This weekend, I buried my head in the thick red hair of a Scottish drama (if you know, you know), forgetting the red-flag fire warnings and fast-spreading virus for 18th century smallpox and Red Jamie. Then I packed myself between pillows, a salad bowl with ice cream, and read my new download on Kindle “front-to-back.” I love how I can never tell how many pages lie ahead or behind; how a story begins, peaks, and ends within the room of an hour, my whole mind quarantined to an off-white rectangular glow.

. . .

Some of the hills to which we have been running to “deal” with the stress of COVID contagion, are now the landscapes we’re running from. Last night, Marin County’s campfire sky set my thoughts ablaze. The alarming news of oncoming lightning-storms sounded the smoke alarms inside my skull; by noon, the outer haze had smoked me out of my one-bedroom wellbeing and into the streets of indulgent hypothesizing, to stampede with a crowd of what-ifs and wouldn’t that be horrible?!s. Sitting at the kitchen table for dinner with the AC blasting, some portion of my lungs refused to intake oxygen, like a toddler refusing peas at their high chair. I’m scared. I only eat scared things now.

With the coinciding emergencies of the pandemic and the California wildfires, it all feels like too much. As my neighbor put it, “2020 needs to end now.”

I agreed on some shallow level. But, listening to a Longform Podcast with Cheryl Strayed from May this morning, I realized that this crisis was not a 2020 issue that we will soon put behind us. Rather, it’s a being-alive-in-the-world issue that we need to learn to live within, into the future: “Life is always unpredictable,” Strayed says. “We never know what will happen tomorrow. For me, these times are just a reminder of that.”

While the public spotlight on several universal crises makes it feel rare, the overlap of disasters—the coincidence of crap that we think we can’t get through—is not. It is a constant possibility on the personal level.

If you know Cheryl Strayed’s story, you’ll trust her on this. While she’s famous for her adventurous memoir Wild, it was her first novel Torch—which tells the story of the death of her mother when Strayed was twenty-two—that lit me with a new empathy for (wo)mankind. This was the book that, in its raw realism, illustrated the unfairness and shock/shit-show that is living in love with mortal beings; it is the book which made me see not only her, but all humans, as incredibly brave and fragile. Most importantly, Torch helped me realize that writing (and any attempt at representing human experience) is not about chasing fame. It is about chasing words—a language that might articulate the glory and the grief, the sinking and the floating, the exquisite joy and suffering that constitute being alive.

Unless you’re a veery bird in Brazil who can predict the severity of each hurricane season (a product of my most recent mental escapade into the Netflix show Connected), good and bad surprises will always hide just beyond the bend of human knowledge. The infernos of climate change, the political rifts dividing us, the Zoom-warped, disease-fearing lifestyle of this COVID era, are all symptoms of braving the unknown, opaque waters of the world. The contents lurking in this landscape will change, but the nature of it won’t.

If this is true, I want to learn how to be okay when “things” aren’t; to occupy wellbeing (and help others do the same) for as long as I’m able, rather than rush to evacuate its premises whenever I smell the faintest smoke. I want to look back on my life and see that, mostly, I “left my numb legs in the shallows and sought equilibrium—with other brave swimmers—in the depths.”

. . .

Like many people I know, I’ve begun to mountain bike this summer. On the weekends, I’ll drop my remote control and grip my handle bars, heading for the hills. Ascending above civilization on my treaded wheels and tremulous knees, my cortisol levels recede. The endorphins of climbing uphill, replete with the adrenaline of descending down, make mountains seem like a topographical time-lapse of life’s valleys and peaks—a metaphorical terrain reminding me of the inevitability of change, and of how much better it feels to stay in motion during the hard parts (even if this motion is laborious, thick, or barely visible).

Sometimes, when I see a hill coming, I’ll put my bike into higher gear instead of a lower one, counter to fellow-bikers’ advice. I crave not so much the challenge, as I do the solid certainty of small movement resulting in serious motion—the concentration of value in each stroke. With each push and pull of my legs, the wheels beneath me are doing triple or quintuple that (making 2-5 rotations). The ratio between what I’m physically miming to the progress being made feels swollen with poetry.

When I bike, I can’t help but read my movements as a metaphor for the power that simple, forward actions can generate when they are made with intensity and intention; when they are made against, or despite, the resistance of change.

. . .

More than hiking, swimming, or biking, writing is my form of forward movement. Words allow me other worlds; more, they deepen my understanding of the one I live inside. Each rotation I make from an essay or story’s beginning, middle, and end these days is a pedal stroke in high gear. I don’t need public applause to know that it is taking me somewhere (though, admittedly, it helps). I’m certain of it, just as the biker is certain of how that tree once ahead of her is now behind her.

Of course, just as pedaling in 7th gear before a steep incline is not recommended, neither is creativity during a pandemic: “I can’t write during this time. Creativity just isn’t an option for me…no, I don’t feel like now is the best time to be writing,” said countless artists on their podcasts this summer.

 Yet (while I still can’t quantify it), it feels like every unlikely or difficult thing we do now is doing more than meets the eye. I feel the “strange poetic pressure” that I felt in that lake upon us now, transforming “what we are doing into something more than what we are doing.” That is to say, I think these scary, paralyzing times are when our pedal stroke counts most, when each motion, each “sentence” we put down, could take us—and perhaps more importantly, take those who look and listen for us—the farthest.

I’m guessing you’re in high gear too. I’m guessing that the road beneath you (the one that was finally beginning to flatten out, perhaps) is beginning to curve upward again. I’m guessing you don’t want to “write,” don’t want to do whatever that thing is to you that writing is to me.

To that, Cheryl Strayed has something to say. It greeted me from her Facebook page this morning like a harsh ray of sun through “closed” blinds: “YOU CAN DO IT. (From someone who often thinks she can’t and yet always fucking does.)”

What are you doing in spite of the incline? What is your forward movement? Do you read? Meditate? Write? Bake? Paint? Do you work out in that rectangle of rug between your bed and your closet? Floss?

I wonder if you notice the distance you gain each time you take this step. If you look up from your slow, powerful motions and find you are no longer in the same place you were a minute ago. I wonder if you can feel the bigness in your small successes as you move through the waters that try to numb you; as you take strides up a surface that would rather have you spinning your wheels.

Do you feel your power? I do. Strayed does.