I am writing this at the gate in Islamabad, waiting on a flight to Istanbul, fifteen pounds lighter than when I arrived and not entirely sure the person flying home is the same one who flew out.
For three weeks I had nothing I normally lean on. No hot shower. No toilet most days. No glass of wine at the end of the night, no easy variety of food, no warm bed, none of the small comforts I had stopped even noticing because they are always there. And no Louise, no girls - which was the only absence that truly ached. You let go of all of it at once and at first it is jarring, a kind of freefall. Then, after enough days of walking, something clarifies. You find out quickly what you actually miss and what you only thought you would miss. I missed my family more than I can say. I missed real food. The rest - the showers, the comforts, the nightly rituals - fell away more easily than I ever would have guessed.
The walking itself was the hardest thing my body has done. Twenty-kilometer days over glacier and loose rock, nothing ever flat. Nights so cold that crossing camp to the toilet tent felt like an expedition of its own. One morning above K2 I woke feeling like I was underwater, and the hike out was like crossing an ocean floor in a weighted vest. And then there was the pass - a night climb up a single rope line in the dark, headlamps strung out above me like low stars, and a descent where, halfway down the danger zone, the rope simply ended and we were left to pick our way across forty-degree pitches of frozen rock with a thousand feet of nothing below. I have never been more frightened, or more completely awake.
That is the thing I keep turning over. Out here, stripped of everything I use to stay comfortable, I felt more alive than I have in years - and it made me look hard at the life I had built around comfort back home. So much of what I call security is really just complacency wearing a nicer coat. We arrange our days to be soft and safe and frictionless, and we mistake that for living well, even as the softness quietly costs us our health, our vitality, our sense of being genuinely here. Comfort, I have come to think, is a trap. Hold it too close for too long and you settle into it like a chair you cannot get out of. That is not how we are built. There is a middle road between recklessness and that slow surrender to ease, and finding it is the clearest thing I am carrying home.
I am not going to become a mountaineer. I have daughters who need their father, and a life I love. But a journey like this every year or two - less a vacation than a pilgrimage, something hard enough to take everything from you and hand back something truer - feels like one of the healthier things a person can do. You push through the discomfort, and on the other side there is a strength you did not know you had, and you get to bring it home with you.
I do not know yet what the next one will be. But I have already started to dream it.