When I was younger, I believed that every journey should have a summit—that if you worked hard enough, pushed long enough, you would reach the top. That belief wasn’t just something I carried privately; it was instilled in me from every direction. The American way, I was told, was clear: success comes to those who earn it. Work hard, and doors will open. Climb diligently, and you will be rewarded. It was a cultural inheritance, passed down like a family heirloom—unquestioned, gleaming with promise.
But like so many things we inherit unquestioned, it didn’t hold under pressure. Life, with its strange timing and shifting terrain, has a way of unraveling our neatest assumptions. I’ve come to learn that effort doesn’t always equal achievement. Sometimes the mountain doesn't yield. Sometimes your legs give out. Sometimes, despite everything, you don’t make it to the top. And the older I get, the more I find myself asking whether the top was ever the point at all.
I’ve thought about that question a lot lately—especially after revisiting a photo I took years ago while hiking the trail to Half Dome in Yosemite. It’s a simple picture. A set of uneven stone stairs climbing skyward, cut directly into the mountain. The kind of trail that looks handmade—part history, part determination. I remember how those steps felt underfoot. The way they pulled me upward even as my legs protested. The steady rhythm of breath and boot, the weight of my pack, the silence of the trail broken only by wind and my own exertion.
What the photo doesn’t show—what no camera could—was the moment I stopped. I never made it to the cables. I attempted the final switchbacks, the steep, relentless incline that snakes upward before the famous ascent. But my body began to tremble. Every step became a negotiation between ambition and reality. And then, just before the final climb, I stopped moving altogether.
I stood there—alone at the base of the last push—and watched as others passed me. I remember seeing their determination, their careful grip on the rocks, their ascent into the gray shimmer of elevation. And I stood still. Not out of fear, exactly, but out of honesty. My legs were done. My heart was pounding. My spirit wasn’t broken, but it was tired. And something in me whispered, This is far enough.
For a long time, that moment felt like failure. Not in a loud, dramatic way—but in a quiet, shameful sense of having fallen short. I didn’t write about it. I didn’t talk about it. I kept it hidden under the pile of things I thought I might one day redeem. I had believed that the story only mattered if I reached the top.
But then, months ago, I stood in front of J. M. W. Turner’s The Pass of Saint Gotthard while traveling through Birmingham. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But once I found it, I couldn’t look away.
The painting is thunder held in stillness. The cliff faces rise like ancient guardians, jagged and merciless. A winding road—stone-carved, almost impossibly narrow—traces the wall of the mountain. A lone figure moves along it, dwarfed by scale, half-consumed by the approaching clouds. There is no triumphant peak in sight. No finish line. Only the road, the chasm below, and the slow, perilous crawl forward.
And something in me recognized that scene. Not just the drama of it, but the truth of it. I saw in that traveler the part of myself that had stood at the base of Half Dome, watching others ascend. The painting didn’t feel like a portrait of heroism. It felt like a portrait of perseverance. Of continuing on, not because you are sure of success, but because it is the road you are on.
There’s a quiet dignity in that.
John Muir wrote, “The mountains are calling and I must go.” But he also wrote, “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” I didn’t reach the summit, but I received something deeper—something I hadn’t known I was looking for. I received the kind of clarity that only comes when ambition and humility meet on the trail. I learned that the summit is not a measure of worth. The turning point—when you stop, when you listen to your body, when you surrender the narrative you’d hoped to tell—is its own kind of arrival.
Turner’s painting, like my photo, is not about conquest. It’s about confronting the immensity of the world and continuing forward anyway. It’s about recognizing that the road itself—dangerous, narrow, often invisible—is where the meaning lives. Not in flags planted, not in peaks reached, but in the act of walking at all.
When I look at that photo now, I don’t see failure. I see a man who honored his limits. Who knew when to keep climbing and when to let the mountain be. I see someone who still carries that moment—alone, aching, quiet—as a kind of gift.
And when I return to Turner’s painting, I no longer envy the traveler on the other side of the pass. I see myself on the ledge, not triumphant, but truthful. Not victorious, but fully alive.
Maybe the greatest ascent isn’t about reaching the top at all.
Maybe it’s knowing when to stop—and still calling it a climb.