Today, is not a regular day. It is monsoon. It’s raining with a drip drop here and there. Beautifully cloudy and pleasant. Almost Romantic! It feels like falling in love all over again and again and again. And my heart craves to go to the mountains. The beauty that it holds at this time is simply infatuating!

I live in the plateaus, and the mountains here are the Sahyadri Ranges which are beautiful and transform into descended heavens during Monsoons. Oh! did I mention it has just started raining. The grass here is soft, tender, and it has a light shade of green, yet almost fluorescent. It’s such a refreshing sight and you feel like rolling down the slope. It’s surreal!

I have never been a Mountain-person. I have always enjoyed beaches more. Beaches, calm you and steer you now and then to take a break, put your feet down to sit, relax, enjoy a cool beer in hand, look at the sunset and live in the moment. However, the mountains; however I believe they have something different in them.

The Mountains tell us a different story. They tell you to keep moving, be alert, be focused, and stop now and then, to see how far you have come, enjoy the valley, the peaks, and the quiet. Yet never let your guard down, a misstep, and you are destined for a fall, or your LIFE will be at risk.

Standing tall is like a metaphor for life itself. Its heights are so intimidating and make all your life’s problems look so small, inconspicuous. Just like life will promise you, its sudden ups and downs, highs and lows, take you through good times and bad; so are the mountains. They will promise you a peak and a valley at the same time!

My first experience with the mountains was when I went on my first ever ‘Trek’. I didn’t even know what it meant or what to expect out of it. Life, at that time, had been rough. Teenage years with student loans, bad finances, love triangles, peer pressure, heartbreaks, and all. Nonetheless, I signed up for it. It meant going up one peak, crossing fourteen smaller peaks to reach another significant mountain peak! There were small streams, forest patches, peaks, cliffs, valleys, sudden drops, waterfalls, shaky ground, reptiles, fireflies….everything. I saw everything, and I saw YETI!!

Man, I had the time of my life, I re-experienced everything that had occurred in my life until then, highs, lows, times when I wanted to give up, times when it felt like a breeze, times when I had realizations and revelations about myself, times I hurt myself, times when I still picked up. Times when I was leading and times when I was the last. It took me everything I had in me to conquer and reach my destination. At the end of the day, I was done, empty, exhausted, dirty, and hungry! But it felt peaceful. It felt great. It felt like I achieved something. As if I learned a great deal about myself! As if I met myself for the first time. I never knew I had so much stamina, patience, and resilience. I learned that I could live with so much less. And to tell you the truth, the view from the top is simply P-H-E-N-O-M-E-N-A-L.

It’s worth everything you struggled for. Something you would never experience had you not toiled throughout the journey. It’s like a PRIZE for all the hard work you did all along and trusted the journey. And trust me, it’s worth the wait! You get to see all your journey in a flash and why it was so difficult all this while. You never understand that when you are in the process, but it all makes sense when you reach the TOP. It’s like the dots connected somehow.

How did I see Yeti, you ask? Well, Yeti, by definition, is said to be an ape-like creature purported to inhabit the Himalayan Mountain range, an Abominable Snowman! I was not supposed to find it in the Sahyadri’s. But think about it, Yeti is a mythical creature, 8-15 feet tall, hairy, lives in the woods, abominable, yet he never comes back to civilisation. Why would someone come up with such a definition of it? Does anyone know its gender? Think about it.

Maybe, the Yeti is in all of us. Our higher self, our real self, our consciousness? Who I met in the woods was my higher self, my self-realization (described as 15 feet tall), I was covered in dust (hairy/unkempt), close to nature (lives in woods), terrible looking (abominable), yet peaceful, not wanting to come back to my stressful life back home (never comes back to civilization). And the yeti’s gender is undefined, much like our higher consciousness.

Yeti is us. You and me. It lives in us. But belongs to the mountains. It wants to remain there, and live a simple life. More aware of every moment and breath, much like a lot of us who get routinely tired by city life, the humdrum, the stress, and the meaninglessness of this all.

I believe, every being, needs to experience the Mountains in their raw form. Trek if you can, commute if you can’t, but experience the Mountains for once. Even if your bio does not read ‘an avid traveller’, you must experience the mountains at least once. I promise, you will meet yourself; you will meet the yeti in you. The Mountains can make you look small, yet grow within yourself. The very times when you navigate tricky terrains, like where it is a question of life and death, that is when all your survival instincts kick in, and all your senses come alive. This is the time when you feel alive in every cell of your body. This is the highest level of awareness and focuses on your experience. You are aware of every breath, every sense, and every touch in your body. This is where you learn, what matters and what does not. The Mountains teach you that you need so less to be so happy. The Mountains teach you about life. It takes you back to basics and yet you feel so rich, so accomplished, so poor and yet so wealthy.

Experience life like it should be. Go back to basics, go back to yeti, go back to the Mountains!

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