It was minus 5.  The wind gusted to 50 m.p.h.  But the smile never faded.

Patrick stood on top.

On Friday, March 5, 2010 at 11:35 a.m., after months of preparation and training, Patrick Kral summited Mt. Washington.  As far as we know, he is the first ever Special Olympian to make a winter ascent of the peak.

I must admit to having had a fair amount of skepticism when I first heard of Patrick’s desire to do a winter climb of Mt. Washington.   By any standard, it is a difficult and dangerous objective. Mt. Washington has the reputation of having the most ferocious weather on earth. The yellow warning sign at the trailhead says it all: “many have died” attempting the climb.

So when the executive director of the Farmington Valley ARC, the organization that works with Patrick, approached me to discuss Patrick’s goal, I doubted the wisdom of any of it.

Until I met Patrick.

I found myself instantly engaged by his passion. His passion to climb. But more than that, his passion to experience life.

At 29, he retains the fresh enthusiasm of a teenager.  And although somewhat stocky, he is marathon runner with some truly impressive times.  But it is his spirit that is most remarkable.

When I first discussed the project with Patrick, I explained what would be required to train for the trip: the running, the stair stepper, the technical skills he had to master.  He never flinched. With his signature grin, he simply wanted to know when we would start.

So we began the months of planning and preparation.  But in the end, it was the guide who was guided.  I learned far more than I taught.

Here are the lessons I learned from Patrick:

Live without fear.  I’ve introduced plenty of folks to climbing over the years.  Fear and climbing are pretty steady companions.  There are  those precipices and that nasty thing called gravity. There are the pointy tools and sharp objects and falling rock and ice.  There is the snow and numbing cold.  There are lots of things to be afraid of. And by in large,  a healthy fear is, well, a healthy thing to have.  But unmitigated fear gets in the way – of learning – and of living.  It is not possible to experience and enjoy the fullness that life offers if you constantly live in fear.

I don’t know whether Patrick is really fearless.  But he certainly seems to live that way. Everything we did together he entered into with excitement and bold anticipation. And the sheer joy that is experience untainted by fear is a thing marvelous to behold.

Persist. Learning any new skill – especially as an adult – is tough.  We don’t want to look stupid.  We do. We think we should learn things faster.  We don’t.  We think we shouldn’t fail.  We do.  We turn back.  We give up.  We fail to persist.  And in doing so, we miss out.

Patrick never quit.  I don’t think he ever though of quitting.  If he did, he didn’t say so.  He never complained.  He never whined. Up steep slopes where his balance was precarious, over icy rocks with crampons, through unconsolidated snow, Patrick kept on going.  In the marathon of life, Patrick will win.

Believe that anything is possible. When working on any big project, it is easy to get discouraged. The logistics and the  immensity of putting the myriad pieces together to achieve a goal can easily overwhelm. When you don’t believe, your dreams die. The self-fulfilling prophecy of doubt dooms you.

I don’t think Patrick ever doubted that he would accomplish his dream of summiting Mt. Washington.

Want more. Life is not static.  It holds such promise. Such fullness. There is so much that waits for us if we but seek it out.  The next goal, the next adventure, the next experience of joy.  We can chose to make our lives extraordinary.  And yet, it is easy – especially as time goes by – to limit ourselves in what we hope to experience and attain, resorting again and again to the old refrains of job constraints, lack of time, money, age and fitness.

At our celebration dinner after summiting, I was still basking in the glow of success on a nearly perfect winter day in the White Mountains.  As the beer dulled the soreness in my quads, Patrick looked at me across the table and grinned.  “Do you want to sky dive?” he asked.

Without a doubt, a lot of what enables Patrick to succeed is the community that supports him. Steve Morris, the ARC’s executive director, is a true visionary.  He believes in his heart that, given the opportunity, anyone can accomplish anything, regardless of disability.  But all of us have the choice to surround ourselves with visionaries, people  who support our dreams and goals; and we have the option to avoid the naysayers.

Patrick Power.  Would that we all could have it.

Have you ever seen a sextant?

It’s a beautiful instrument, isn’t it?  Conceived of by Sir Isaac Newton and in use since the early 1700s, generations of mariners have used the sextant  for navigation. By measuring the altitude of a celestial object above the horizon, you can figure out where you are.

Which is a pretty good thing to know.

Now, a GPS unit is nowhere near as elegant.

But it’s used for navigation too.  In fact, you can pinpoint a location with a GPS unit within thirty feet. I took one to the Andes recently.  Pretty amazing technology.

But the problem is, even with the best technology, you can still stray off course.

Staying on course can be a challenge.  When I first learned to sail and navigate, I learned a method called dead reckoning.  It’s the process of estimating your current position based upon a previously determined position and advancing the position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.

The problem with dead reckoning is that since new positions are calculated solely from previous ones, the errors of the process are cumulative.  If you misjudge any one element, like wind or cross-current, there will be an error in your estimated position.  And an error with a position fix compounds and grows with time.

Even with new technology, this is true.

Let’s say you are sailing from Marion, Massachusetts to Bermuda in the annual race.  The distance is 645 miles. What would happen if you were just 2 degrees off course for the entire distance?  You might know where you were with your GPS. But unless you corrected course, you’d miss the island entirely.  (Not to mention the party at the finish.)

Two degrees doesn’t sound like much.  But over time, the error compounds.  The outcome can be disasterous.

Kind of like real life.

I’ve been listening to a wonderful program by the legendary motivational counselor and success trainer, the late Jim Rohn. It’s called The Art of Exceptional Living.  In it, Rohn talks about the importance of “mid-course” corrections.

“When they send a rocket to the moon,” he says, “they know the rocket will eventually get a little off course. The first set of guidance systems will not be enough for the whole trip.  There will be a need for a mid-course correction.”

“You and I are no different,” says Rohn.  “From time to time we, too, must execute our own mid-course correction.”

Journeys don’t always go as planned.  It’s easy to get off track.  To lose one’s way.

What may have once been the right career or job or school or partnership may not be any longer.  Goals change. Dreams change. People change. The course once plotted may no longer take you to where you now need and want to go.  Continuing to forge ahead is not the fix. It will compound the error.  A reef in the Lesser Antilles and not Bermuda.

In the stock market, there’s an old adage: don’t try to catch a falling knife.  The phrase is used to describe an investor’s tendency to hold on to a troubled stock, even when it’s in a free fall. Sticking by a miscalculation in judgment can only hurt you.

Exit, regroup, reconsider.

Men are particularly bad at asking directions, I’m told.  But directions are helpful too. From professionals, coaches, counselors and friends.

Take time to assess, to plot, to plan.  Again.

Straying off course is part of the trip.

And it’s ok to decide to change course. To reconsider where you want to go. Or how you want to get there. The Lesser Antilles may be a better destination after all.

When I sail, I’m always tinkering at the helm.  Watching the compass, assessing the current, sensing the wind, correlating it all with the GPS.  And constantly making small adjustments.  To stay on course.

What a useful skill I think this might be.

Stop by and visit us at Hampton Photography when you have the chance.

‘Have you guessed the riddle yet?’ the Hatter said, turning to Alice  again.

‘No, I give it up,’ Alice replied: ‘that’s the answer?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said the Hatter.

‘Nor I,’ said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with the  time,’ she  said, ‘than waste it in asking riddles that have no  answers.’

‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk  about  wasting IT. It’s HIM.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Alice.

‘Of course you don’t!’ the Hatter said, tossing his head  contemptuously. ‘I dare  say you never even spoke to Time!’

‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied: ‘but I know I have to beat time    when I  learn music.’

‘Ah! that accounts for it,’ said the Hatter. ‘He won’t stand beating.’

Time is our friend.  Time is not our friend.  Time is relative.

It takes too much time. We have time on our hands.  We have no time.

Time.  What an interesting construct.

I have always been fascinated by Einstein’s theories: the relative passages of time, the time-space continuum, the possibility of time travel.

It is the stuff of science fiction.  And yet we struggle with the reality of time every day.

I know I do.  I get to the end of the day and I wonder where it all went.  Did someone surreptitiously shorten it?  Or did I suffer a brain infarct that caused me to miss some of it?

It seems that there is never enough time.

Many years ago on a colleague’s desk, I saw a  3 x 5 index card.  On it, she had written, “Make Time Happen.”

I always liked that.  It seemed to connote a capacity to control time, to wrestle it (him?) to the ground, to make it stop and do what we want it to do.

And to a certain extent we can.  We can take charge of our time.  We can organize our days well. We can steer clear of the time sinks of email and social media. We can avoid the abyss of television.

We can use our Day-Timers; we can make a daily list of goals; we can delegate; we can apply the Pareto Principle focusing on what yields the highest and best return on our time.

But time still slips by.

We can “buy” some time.  I always liked that concept too.  A photographer friend of mine does this.  He has “bought” a year here and a year there.  He works very hard over a period of time, saving enough money so that he can stop working and focus just on his art.  For him, the time that he has “purchased” is his own.

But time still slips by.

We can live our lives mindfully, consciously, deeply and fully, filling our days with what most feeds our intellects and our souls, aware of the preciousness – and fragility – of each moment.

But time still slips by.

Photography is a particularly brutal reminder of time’s passage.  One of my boys turned 21 last week.  I look into the photograph on my desk that I took of him when he was just 7.  Where did that time go?  I see the picture of my mother on my shelf looking out at me across the years, young and fresh and hopeful, standing next to me when I was all but three.  How cruel time is, I think.

But Time doesn’t much care.

It is the riddle of the Hatter.

This much is clear:  We are all on borrowed time.  There is no time to waste.

And although we have all the time in the world, it isn’t much.

To live into – and cherish – every minute.  That’s the mission.

On rare occasions, Time seems to stop.  Like under the midnight sun, deep in the Alaska Range.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

— Albert Einstein

I fear that fun may be a lost art.

I attended a gathering of fellow professionals a couple of weeks ago.  A fancy, elegant black tie gala. During cocktails, I found myself conversing with a colleague that I hadn’t seen since the previous year’s event.  After engaging in the requisite flexing of professional muscle, I asked, “So what are you doing for fun?”

It was if I had asked him to recite the derivation of Pi.

He cocked his head and reached into the deep recesses of his mind.  “I just joined the board of directors of the local university,” he said. “I only had to pay three thousand dollars for the privilege.”

Perhaps we should go back to the professional muscle flexing, I thought.

About a month earlier, I had given one of my Denali slide shows and presentations to a business group. When I got to the end of the talk, I summed up with a kind of “call to arms:”  I encouraged the folks in the studio audience to seek out the adventure in their own lives, to find for themselves what is compelling and fun.

When I looked out at the group – dressed in their Brooks Brothers best – I wondered for a moment whether I had lapsed into Martian dialect of sorts.  It was as if there was no recognition of the word at all.

Fun?

Has fun fallen out of fashion?

I know that my idea of fun – living in stinky polypro for weeks at a time in sub-zero temperatures – isn’t the norm.  But I’m fairly certain that there are other ways to have fun too.

When I first started my professional career, the partner who had been assigned as my mentor said, “You get three weeks of vacation.  You can’t take them all at once. And of course, no one really takes them at all.”

That seemed odd to me.  I promptly planned three weeks away.

Early on in that job, I became friends with an associate who was two years my senior.  Jack had a great sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye.  But he had no time to play.  He had his eye on the prize:  partnership.  He assured me that once he grabbed that brass ring, he would have time for frolic and detour.

Jack became a partner.  But the successive years of eighty hour weeks dulled his gaze and flattened his affect.  He forgot how to have fun.

Fun isn’t optional.  It is essential to the fullness of our lives.

My old friend Anne constantly reminds me of the necessity of focusing on the “fun-factor.” Right about now, she’s on a small boat sailing to Antarctica.

A new friend, Pete, a student of Jack Canfield’s, shared with me a portion of his vision statement for living.  “Fun, freedom and fulfillment,” he said.  I like the way he thinks.

I know that not everything is fun.  There’s no question about that.  But I hear this refrain so often:  “Wow, the weekend was fun.  Now it’s back to reality.”

If “reality” contains no measure of fun, then something is out of balance.

Without fun, we are one-dimensional. Boring.

There seems to be a pervasive belief that work and play are antithetical.  Not so I think.

Fun enriches our work.  Our very best work – the work that most reflects our essential selves – the work in which we lose all sense of time – is fun.

My mentor Galen Rowell, in his beautiful collection entitled Mountain Light, spoke to this synergy in his own work of photography:  “I entered a world with no firm boundaries between working, playing and living,” he said. How rich a world that was.

How rich a world that is.

Steve Jobs says, “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:  If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

In his recent book Career Renegade, Jonathan Fields writes, “We are here to let our lights shine as brightly as possible, to drink in the joy of friendship and family, to serve and better the greater community, and to tap into and inspire passion in everything we do.  We are here to come alive. In doing so, we serve as an example to others that a life beyond muddling by is not only possible, but mandatory.”

We need to have fun.  And we need to have it now.  Too many folks put it off:  to when the kids are older, to when they’re out of college, to when they retire.  But the time never comes.  There are always more commitments. Events intervene. Health fails.  Life ends.

There is no time to waste.

If fun is falling out of fashion, I’m going back to bellbottoms.

I was breathing hard.  And the temperature was dropping quickly.  But I was happy sitting in my Crazy Creek chair covered with my thick down sleeping bag.  Three days’ walk from the nearest road, I sank into mindless contentment with my trashy paperback.

It was New Year’s Eve and there was a fair amount of activity around base camp.  As the voices drifted in and out, I heard Zeb complain that the Internet was down.

The Internet?

We were deep in the Andes.  In a desolate landscape. At 14,000 feet.  Who brought the Internet and why was it here?

One of the great joys for me of journeying out on the edge is being out of touch.  Off the grid.

My everyday life is tied to my computer.  My BlackBerry goes everywhere with me. I am on the phone.  Non-stop.

When I go to the mountains, I go for the quiet and the solitude.  I go to “get away from it all.” One of the most exciting moments for me as I begin any trip is creating my “away” message on my phone:  “I’m away.  I don’t have access to voice mail or email.  Don’t bother leaving a message.”

When I first journeyed into the Great Ranges nearly 20 years ago, the Internet was in its infancy. Cell phones looked like shoe boxes.  Radio coverage was spotty.  If I wanted to communicate with the outside world, I would hand off a letter to an expedition going out.  Maybe the letter would get there.  And maybe not.

Traveling to third world countries even 10 years ago, I would have to search out an Internet “cafe” if I wanted to send a message.  In villages, there would be computers with old 8088 processors that would batch their emails.  And then send them out once a day.  Or maybe once a week.  Or maybe not at all!

Of course  I’ve watched the creep occur.  I’ve even participated in it.  As technology has evolved, all of us have relied on it to provide us with access to weather information.  With satellite availability, it was a small step to emergency communication.  And another small step to staying in touch with the fam back home.  And another small step to keeping your sponsors and friends and fans up to date.  And blogging and Twitter and Facebook.

And why was it that we came out here again?

If we “can’t get away from it all,”  if we can’t go “off the grid,”  how do we renew our souls?

It seems like we as a society have lost our capacity for solitude.  My 16 year old son can’t go more than a minute and a half – literally – without texting.  The head banging music at my gym causes me to think about putting Grey Goose in my Nalgene. We’ve been in restaurants and waiting rooms and even department store check-out lines where a television runs non-stop whether anyone is watching it or not.

We seem to need the “input” to feel alive. We are uncomfortable with quiet.

I am re-reading The Genesee Diary, a book I first read nearly 30 years ago.  It resonates even more deeply for me today.

The author Henri Nouwen was a professor, prolific writer and much in-demand public speaker. Feeling burned out by his schedule, Nouwen went to live for seven months in a Trappist Monastery.  In the process of planning this time “off the grid,” he struggled with with the bind in which so many of us find ourselves:  between wanting and needing solitude on the one hand, and wanting and needing to feel alive in our skin on the other.

He writes, “When I took a closer look at this I realized that that I was caught in a web of strange paradoxes.  While complaining about too many demands, I felt uneasy when none were made. While speaking about the burden of letter writing, an empty mailbox made me sad.  While fretting about tiring lecture tours, I felt disappointed when there were no invitations.  While speaking nostalgically about an empty desk, I feared the day on which that would come true.  In short, while desiring to be alone, I was frightened of being left alone.   The more I became aware of these paradoxes, the more I started to see how much I had indeed fallen in love with my own compulsions and illusions, and how much I needed to step back and wonder, ‘Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating affirmations and rejections of my little world? Is there a still point where my life is anchored and from which I can reach out with hope and courage and confidence?'”

“Hello darkness, my old friend.  I’ve come to talk with you again.” The Sound of Silence, the song that propelled Simon and Garfunkel to stardom, was a favorite of mine. But the ability to touch the dark and silent places has become harder and harder.

With the creep of the grid, it is more important than ever to seek out – and to carve out – those moments of solitude – the places of quiet – that re-create us.

I’m going to work harder at leaving the BlackBerry behind.