#article #primalreads
# On the Meaning of Climbing a Mountain
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##After more than two months of running and walking in Guangzhou’s Baiyun Mountain, I began to understand that climbing is not about reaching a height, but about learning how to live with effort, uncertainty, and the quiet rhythm of one’s own body.##
#essay #reflection #walking #nature
*For more than two months now, I have been running and hiking in Baiyun Mountain, in Guangzhou. What I have observed and felt during this time has slowly shaped my own understanding of life, survival, and what it means to live.*
At a certain stage in life, reflection on existence becomes unavoidable. Even the most accomplished scholars and scientists circle endlessly around such questions. I am not particularly invested in these debates, yet I often wonder how one might live in a way that feels grounded and alive. So I took a detour—from abstraction to action—and turned to something ordinary: climbing a mountain, letting a small but persistent anxiety gradually settle.
A mountain has its own temperament. The air is fresh, the surroundings quiet. Boulders and trees stand where they are, neither competing nor intruding, unchanged for ages. What draws me most, however, is not permanence but variation: new paths, hidden water sources, subtle shifts of color.
When you run or walk here, you hear the wind rushing past, water flowing, birds beating their wings among the branches. If you feel inclined, you can open your arms and embrace the thick trunk of a tree, allowing your body and mind to loosen their grip.
On dirt paths, dry leaves murmur softly beneath your feet, creating the feeling that even solitude has company. When climbing steep cliffs, courage and alertness—long neglected—seem to return on their own.
In some remote corner of the mountain, you may encounter a modest woman who, for over twenty years, has quietly repaired the long mountain trails, day after day, asking for nothing in return.
Here, you become an explorer. You notice forms of wildness you usually overlook—the alertness of deer, the laziness of cats. At times, a primitive strength rises within you, along with behaviors that feel almost feral. You approach a state of no-man’s-land, where you can sing at the top of your lungs and let your voice dissolve into the vastness around you.
On clear days, you can see far. Ridges rise and fall in a gentle continuity. On rainy days, muddy paths reveal a different landscape—lonely, subdued.
Deep in the forest under such skies, you feel like a squirrel wrapped in dim grayness, your vision narrowed. But if a single beam of sunlight pierces the canopy, your eyes light up at once, and warmth fills you unexpectedly.
A mountain offers more than green. Exposed yellow earth speaks of wounds and erosion; trees clinging to bare rock speak of resilience.
Once, I lost myself in a forest tangled with vines. A flash of despair passed through me. Yet by continuing upward, step by step, I eventually found my way back.
A mountain cannot be understood by climbing it only once. Only by crossing ridge after ridge, circling hollow after hollow, exhausting the body while quietly sustaining attention, can one, through unceasing steps, experience the feeling of being returned to life.
> Climbing a mountain is a bit like classical music—
> not very romantic, yet profoundly real.
> It is also a bit like rock and jazz:
> free and improvised, yet governed by an inner order.
[[
> Each breath, each pause,
> is the body keeping time for itself.
Whether you have reached the summit or are still on the way up, as long as you can keep moving—and are willing to go farther—what once seemed like a simple act of climbing is no longer simple at all.
Baiyun Mountain rises in Guangzhou, a city shaped by the sea. It offers little in the way of strange spectacles or mystical grandeur. Yet through walking, it allows one to encounter calm, risk, and uncertainty—and quietly loosens ideas once taken as unquestionable truths. In time, you begin to understand that the tree of life takes root in living soil, growing freely, on its own terms.
