What Are You Climbing For?

Last week I stood on a staircase I had not set foot on since I was seventeen.

It is in my old home in Kashmir. The same steps I walked down on the night of 19 January 1990, in the dark, in a hurry, with no idea that I would not climb them again for thirty-six years.

I am fifty-three now. I went back to stand where that boy once stood.

The steps still creaked in the same places. That is the thing that undid me, oddly. Not some grand rush of memory, just a sound my feet remembered before my mind did. I stood there for a long while and let thirty-six years close the distance between the boy who went down in the dark and the man who came back up in the light.

I have been thinking about that moment ever since.

And I think I finally understand why it affected me the way it did.

It was not the staircase.

It was the difference between the two times I walked down it.

The first time, I did not leave by choice. I left because there was nothing else to do. Like so many others from Kashmir, the only thing on offer was survival.

And survival is not a plan.

It is a reflex.

You do not ask where you are going. You only know what you are running from.

This time was different.

No one was forcing me anywhere. No one was chasing me out. I had come back on my own terms, to pause for a moment, to close a circle before the next climb begins.

Standing there, I realised that this one difference — between being driven and choosing — changes the meaning of almost everything.

Because when survival is no longer the question, a harder one takes its place.

What are you climbing for?

I think many of us arrive at that question without quite noticing.

For a long stretch of life, especially in the early years of a career, we are not really climbing towards something.

We are climbing away.

Away from the bottom.

Away from the fear of going back to having nothing.

Away from the version of ourselves we are quietly trying to prove wrong.

And it works.

That is the trap.

Fear is extraordinary fuel. The fear of falling back can carry you through setbacks, disappointments and years of uncertainty. It carried me much further than confidence ever did.

But it comes with a limitation.

Fear can push.

It cannot pull.

One day, usually much higher up the mountain than you expected, the thing you were running from is so far below you that you can barely see it anymore.

And suddenly the engine that powered everything begins to lose its force.

You find yourself standing at an altitude that was supposed to feel like arrival, wondering why it doesn’t.

Not because anything is wrong.

Simply because the question has changed.

For years, survival answered it for you.

Now it doesn’t.

The freedom to choose your mountain sounds like a reward. In reality, it is a responsibility.

And a surprisingly heavy one.

Most people spend years trying to reach a place where they can choose freely.

Then they get there and discover that choosing is harder than climbing.

I know because I did exactly that.

For a long time I told myself I was keeping my options open.

If I am honest, I was doing something else.

I was avoiding the responsibility of choosing.

Choosing a mountain means admitting it might be the wrong one.

It means accepting that the years you give to something are years you will never get back.

Running never asks that of you.

Running only asks you to keep moving.

There is one thing I have started doing in the last few years that has helped me more than almost anything else.

Before I say yes to a new climb, I try to answer a simple question:

Am I moving towards something, or am I trying to get away from something?

The answer is almost never clean. Most decisions contain a bit of both.

But I have noticed that when the balance is heavily weighted towards escape, the excitement rarely lasts.

The opportunity may look wonderful on paper. Other people may tell you it is obvious. Yet somewhere underneath there is a restlessness driving the decision that has very little to do with the opportunity itself.

I know that feeling well because I spent years listening to it.

The strange thing is that, over time, I have realised the two motivations feel different in the body.

The decisions driven by fear usually come with urgency. A need to prove something. A feeling that I have to act quickly or I will miss out.

The decisions driven by purpose feel quieter.

Not easier.

Not less ambitious.

Just quieter.

For most of my life I trusted the urgent voice because it was louder.

Now I pay much closer attention to the quiet one.

It has taken me fifty-three years to learn that not every opportunity deserves a yes simply because it is available.

And not every path is meant to be climbed simply because you are capable of climbing it.

I wish I had understood that at forty.

There are things I would have walked away from sooner. And there are one or two things that were standing right in front of me that I was simply too busy running to notice.

I am not writing this as someone who has figured it all out.

I went back to those steps precisely because I am asking the question again myself.

At fifty-three, I may still have another thirty years of climbing ahead of me if I am fortunate.

The difference now is that I know the answer has to be chosen consciously.

Survival will not answer it for me anymore.

It has already done its job.

It got the boy off those stairs.

What comes next is my responsibility.

And perhaps yours too.

So let me leave you with a question.

If no one were chasing you, if the bottom you have spent your life climbing away from had already disappeared completely, would you still be climbing the exact mountain you are on today?

And if the honest answer is no, what are you waiting for before you put it down?

Until next Sunday,

Avinash

P.S. I have written the full story of leaving Kashmir, building a life from scratch, and learning much later that survival and purpose are not the same thing in my book, The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, which releases on 3 July.

Pre-order here:
https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf