Nature Does Not Hate You
In the storm's indifference, a conqueror discovers a strange release
The blizzard came without , and it was precisely that absence of which unstrung me most of all.
For weeks I had fought the ice as an enemy, and an enemy, at least, grants you the dignity of hatred.
But the storm did not hate me; it did not know me, and never once had it intended me harm.
Nature does not hate you; it is simply indifferent, and is a colder companion than any .
To be hated is to be seen; to be ignored by something this vast is to be rendered almost nothing.
I crouched in the shrieking dark and felt my own settle over me like a second, heavier snow.
The wind spoke in a language older than any tongue, and immense, addressed to no one at all.
There is a terror in the , but there is also, I discovered, a strange and steadying release.
If the storm cared nothing for my ambition, then my ambition, I saw, had never been the measure of anything.
The conqueror in me had believed the continent was a rival to be beaten, a will opposed to my own.
But there was no rival, no will, no opponent keeping score; there was only weather, and rock, and time.
The mountains were not obstacles placed to test me; they were simply there, older than testing, older than me.
This recognition did not crush me, as I had feared it might, but instead loosened a knot I had long carried.
If the universe keeps no ledger of my victories, then I am free to what victory could even mean.
The humbles, but is not ; it is the clean removal of a burden one need not bear.
I stopped raging at the storm, and in ceasing to rage I found a strength that rage had been concealing.
You cannot defeat the indifferent, but neither, in truth, can the indifferent be said to defeat you.
The storm and I were not at war; we merely occupied the same vast room, unaware of one another.
To accept this is not to surrender; it is to stop wasting one's warmth on a quarrel no one is having.
The cold asks nothing of you, forgives nothing, and remembers nothing; it merely is, endlessly and without comment.
In that I found, unexpectedly, a kind of peace, for it demanded neither my triumph nor my despair.
Men who understand this stop performing for a nature that is not watching, and they save that energy for each other.
I emerged from the storm smaller than I had entered it, and, oddly, far less afraid than before.
The does not us by cruelty; it diminishes our illusions, which is a mercy dressed as terror.
I began to see the men not as instruments of my ambition but as the only warmth in an indifferent .
If nothing out there loved us, then everything we would ever have of love, we would have to make ourselves.
The storm passed, as the indifferent always does, leaving no , no message, and no trace of having noticed us.
I put away my grievance against the sky, for one cannot be wronged by that which never knew one was there.