Saturday, August 2, 2014

Hiking the JMT

I watched the movie Mile ... Mile & A Half last night.

It's a documentary about a few artists who hike the John Muir Trail. This is a 200 mile journey that takes about a month to complete.

The film captures a lot of beautiful scenes. My wife especially loved the views where you looked through a canopy of beautiful trees to see a sky full of stars.

Similar to other movies I have recently seen, this movie is about people going through a hard journey for a great pay-off. The obvious pay-off is the ability to experience amazing natural scenery. A secondary pay-off was the ability to interact and get to know some friends.

The film also highlighted that the painful journey helped accentuate the payoffs. Near the end of the journey, a few friends joined the team and hiked the last bit of the trail together. These newcomers expressed some regret that they hadn't paid their dues by doing the whole trail. They said that since they hadn't gone through all of the pains, they couldn't seem to enjoy the trail as much as their more worn out friends.

I'm a person who seeks to minimize pains as much as possible. The purpose of a lot of my programs is to remove the pain of manually doing something.

Yet, watching this movie makes me feel like pain isn't something we should actively avoid. In fact, hiking the John Muir Trail is something I would love to do some day. Pain and all.