MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
The Other Side Of The Mountainby Jeff Turner
Do you remember that film from the late 60s or early 70s called “The Other Side Of The Mountain”? A young boy goes and lives alone in the mountain wilderness endures hardship, learns about life, and then returns to his everyday life back home with his parents. Right now I am on the other side of the mountain in a way like that movie character was. Things are not what they once were.
After being out of work for a while I have started an out of town project near Boulder, Colorado. The client is but a few miles from the edge of the Rocky Mountains, Colorado’s Front Range. I can go outside in the parking lot and view the line of mountains running from north to south stretching from one end of the horizon to the next in an unbroken line. The peaks and foothills tower above the farmland on the rolling prairie that spreads to its edge.
That image reminds me of this past year. Life was just rolling along like the fields near the peaks and then WHAM, divorce and no job. The peaks had risen up and stopped the rolling plains of my life. Where I thought I was going suddenly changed, and worse, I felt I was in limbo going nowhere. Pressure and stress mounted as time went on; nothing seemed to be going well at all. I knew I needed something else to occupy myself besides a frustrating search for a job.
So one day, I looked around my office, found my books on how to publish a book, and resolved to finish the book I had worked on, the one you now see on Amazon and B&N. While I looked for a job every single day I also now worked on my books, I started something I wanted to do and something people said I was good at. Amidst the angst of my situation I resolved to work on this new effort, a new path down the road of life. In that quest I did learn something about myself. Just as the boy in the film learned how to live from the land, I learned to do something new that was important to me. I knew I could do something I had not done before and that fact gave me new confidence in myself. Now, I am a confident person anyway but when you are faced with major negative events in life having any success can make a huge difference in your outlook on things. Such a triumph helps you reach your own other side of the mountain. In failure or disappointment one small victory, which may only seem small at the time, can be a large factor in getting past a trying period in your life.
Having now reached a place over the top of the past year’s hard to scale peaks, life is returning to normal again. My mood is better, my sense of humor and good nature are as they were before. And I still work on my books. So I have reached the other side of the mountain just like the boy did. I have endured some trying times and life has been restored. It is not the same as it was before but it is good nonetheless and new things to look forward to.
We should all try to find the other side of our own mountains of life and climb the rough peaks, endure the cold winds that blow through us, and learn how to live well again regardless of what we endure to get to a new, warm place in our life.
1 comment:
I think my Other Side of the Mountain Story is about loss-the loss of a spouse.At first, it was emotional- reacting to the loss. Grief is an insidious thing, this sadness creeps in, takes hold and stays until we let it go little by little. It causes a pain that colors everything one does--decisions, living--but you must finally move on to forge a new identity.It takes time to recover,but it was a time to assess personal strengths, weaknesses,needs and to finally move forward. Today, I am not the same person, I was with a spouse whom I loved, but a woman with goals, a loving and supportive family, and a new group of writing friends.I think I'm finally on the other side of the mountain.
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