When I toiled up the mountain, I could not have imagined how hard it would be. As I started the ascent I clung to the thought that the suffering would be little compared to the freeing bliss that I would experience at the other end. As I climbed higher I noticed that life around me became rarer. At the beginning there still were animals grazing in the meadows. Hikers passed me by. But increasingly less as I moved on. Not long after I stopped encountering moving life, also the motionless were unable to maintain themselves on the heartless ground. Nothing surrounded me.

Being at the bottom of the mountain, my spirits high, I put in practice my plan to go up steadily, but fast. I would follow the tracks laid there by others and later rely on visual reference points. Looking back at this, I see my littleness, my character leaning on what others had donated. The track that I followed abruptly ended in the middle of the woods, leaving me with three options: to find my way through the trees, to panic or to go back. At first I felt more comfortable panicking. Then, I considered going back. It would have taken my pride, and with that my life, away from me.

It took endlessly for me to reach the bottom of the crying and screaming. With the last tears the panic drained away and I repossessed my thoughts. I realised the solution was simple: I would go from tree to tree where the next tree was on a higher ground than the one before. It turned out to be a wise choice. I soon noticed more light coming through the trees and I easily reached the end of the woods. I sat down for a while and felt relieved that my pride was still with me. As the tracks had stopped in the woods, I concluded that many had lost theirs.

The ascent continued over grass, rocks and snow. The cold wind looking for open wounds, ready to tear skin off. My mind was still high on the success in the woods earlier: the wind would not break me. It was when the wind dropped, and the fog tickled my face, that hubris got the best of me. Fuelled by earlier success I overestimated my abilities. I stared into the fog looking for rocks on higher ground. The fog was too dense, so I crawled over a rock and reached out for another. Instead of feeling a cold stone, I touched a hole and fell down.

Lying there injured I swallowed the pain. My face scarred. I had assumed that the road to the top would be a straight one. Slowly I came to embrace my ignorance. Where I had cried in the woods, I realised that this time it would tarnish my pride. I surrendered to the elements around me and felt at ease with my fate. It took a while before the fog started dissolving. Slowly I recognised the outline of the rocks around me. Then I noticed an opening. I got up and limped through it. The fog had now completely disappeared. I looked up and realised how close I had been to the top.

So there I was, at the top at last. There was no feeling of eternal happiness, not even a slight relieve. My body ached and my mind had not recuperated from the punches it bore. I imagined what it must have looked like from above, me sitting there at a rock. A little particle squeezed between the bluishness of the sky and the greyness of the rocks. I had had so high expectations of this moment, but it meant nothing to me anymore. I gave myself time to rediscover the feelings that I had anticipated and decided to make home.

The first days were difficult. I was not used to the changing weather conditions, the wind, the cold nights, and found it hard to collect food. I also began to miss motion around me. My wounds were healing slowly, my mind was not. After some time I realised I had been chasing a dream, a fusion of true and fake occurrences, that did not earthen in reality. I had let go of the idea that I would reach some kind of higher state. I would sit on a rock for hours and stare into the distance. Pride, wanting and belonging… terms that did not exist with Nothing around.

I started to long back to my old life, as an old man nostalgic for the past. I felt alienated between the two parallel worlds. The one that I shared with the blue sky and the one that lay at sea level. The sky felt more comfortable at night, where the sight of an open-ended horizon would be replaced with the certainty of the many worlds beyond. During the day I therefore increasingly focussed on the world that I had fought my way out of. The one that lay below. Even when it was not visible when the clouds had gathered over it.

Looking from above I came to understand why I had felt so uncomfortable living in it. People bought off their fear with obedience and lacked the courage to question. They would work to an imposed rhythm, feel pain when allowed to and cheered when under the influence of substances. They would turn to storytellers, who convened in palaces, or cling to those who knew it all. Some even deliberately killed some of their own when asked to do so. At times they appeared unreliable or even outright insane to me. Sometimes their grey and mechanical world just deeply saddened me.

I asked myself whether they felt the same meaninglessness I had felt for years. I wondered about their pride and concluded that pride must have been abandoned to avoid obstructing the rhythm. I wondered how true their sharing was and questioned their selfishness. Love and friendship were sacrificed to ambition. Those at the periphery of their neighbourhoods invisible. They obsessively sucked up enjoyments, exchanging them for the product of their work. In the end I could not any longer distinguish the man from the machine.

Then I left. My pride carefully packed. I told you what happened. I became a man, but with my pride in pieces. The struggling and colouring of my character all seemed to have been pointless. Summers passed and I declined. Then, in the closeness of my dying moment it came to me: meaning is not to be found at the end, in Nothing. Meaning is neither to be found in the pounding rhythmic of our world nor in the craving for enjoyments. The meaning will present itself on the road to Nothing. And it is pride that gets us there.