Episode 86 – Masking the Mountains

This is Rebecca Clark. Episode 86. Masking the Mountains This’ll Podcast is for anyone that knows they haven’t yet found and offered up their best work but are compelled to seek it out and do it. Are you ready to move your desk? I love mountains. I bring them up a lot. In my podcast, they represent Majesty and exquisite nous to me. But also, the climbing of a mountain could represent working hard to work through life challenges and having obstacles to overcome and goals to pursue. But at times, I just like looking at them right, and I’m still in Utah, and I was driving through some farmland and looking up at the Majestic Mountains the other day and was surprised when I drove later in the afternoon of the same day and couldn’t see the majestic mountains. Now this often happens where I’m located because there are inversions. There’s snow, there’s rain, there’s fog, there’s clouds. There are California forest fires where the smoke gets trapped between mountain ranges for a while. But for some reason, on this particular day, I was struck because I had seen ah whole mountain range earlier, and suddenly I did not, and the tallest mountain in the range is about 11,000 ft high. So that’s not a Kilimanjaro or an Everest, but that’s really high. That’s higher than the quote unquote mountains in the Washington D. C area, right? But anyway, one of my first thoughts was, Wow, something is masking the mountains, and it struck me differently than it had before. It wasn’t just a noticing. It was a thinking about it and going, Wait a second. This massive piece of rock is being masked by small particles of water vapor or water, whatever the case may be. And how powerful is that? I guess I took him that a lesson that some of the most meaningful and intangible things in our lives are like that water or water vapor. They’re very small, but they’re very powerful. I’ve talked about air on my podcast before because I dealt with an office situation where there was air pollution and how that impacted our work, and I realized that air fits at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and those of us with a psychology background. I’ve heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and so has the general population But I’ll just state what those are, and it’s usually represented in a pyramid. You could go to the Google and look it up, but at the bottom of the pyramid is our physiological needs. Air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction. Notice how part of these needs are actual physical things, and part of it is not like air, and you could argue it’s physical, but it’s very hard to feel some air or sea it or whatever when it’s up close. But we won’t get into the details of that. The next level up is safety needs. So if our physiological needs air primarily met, we can move on to think about other things. So safety needs personal security, Employment resource is help and property notice how some of those could be physical. Right? Certain resource is property. Maybe there’s an actual place of employment. Well, there always is an actual place, whether it’s a home or somewhere else, right. But personal security is a little bit intangible. We go up the pyramid toe, love and belonging, friendship, intimacy, family, sense of connection. Part of this is physical, but a lot of it is intangible because it’s up to the thoughts of each person as to whether or not they’re feeling loved and a feeling of belonging. Next up on the pyramid is esteem, so respect, self esteem, status, recognition, strength and freedom. This is getting mawr and Mawr intangible and yet more and more powerful. If you look at personal development and growth and impact, you can have in your life and work. And then, of course, we get to the top of this pyramid, which is something that many people that listen to this podcast would want to obtain in their life and that it’s self actualization, the desire to become the most that one can be. That’s intangible, though we can see the results or the outcomes of someone that’s reaching this point, right? They could be creating stuff, are offering services or by the testimonials of people around them. We could know that they were making a difference or doing something that was helping someone in the world. And maybe I’m just philosophizing here today. But as I was on my journey thinking about this topic, I got my daily email from Seth Godin, and it was a very simple thought, but I wanted to share it. The ocean is made of drops. That’s easy to say but hard to visualize. Even a puddle has more drops than we can count. It’s got to be difficult to be a drop. And yet what else could the ocean be made of? For some reason, this tied into the mountains for me because of this water vapor in this fog, the ability of simple small drops of water vapor, whatever was masking a mountain. For some reason, this resonated with me because this huge, tangible object was masked by tiny drops. The same kind of tiny drops that air in the ocean or above it is water vapor had the ability to completely change the scenery for me, even though the tangible object was so much larger or heavy or impossible to move, then the thing that was masking it. So I guess what I’m trying to say in all this is that small, tiny efforts, small habits, small practice, all these things we go through matter because they’re all tiny droplets that add up. And it’s not that we’re trying to mask something, but it shows that all of those tiny things added up can make a huge impact. And maybe your impact isn’t to mask a mountain, but it could create a stir that’s rather large. And I love how nature has a way of teaching us about ourselves without even knowing it. Okay. Uh huh. But pay attention today. So what? You’re spending your time doing what you’re thinking about to remind yourself that it may feel difficult to be a little drop of water, but all those little drops can add up to a puddle. All those little drops can add up to a notion. And all those little drops can add up to something that can cover a mountain. Kind of amazing. Okay, my friends, I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the show today. If you enjoyed it, I’d love if you’d write a review and share the show with your friends, sign up for a weekly nudge at move your desk dot com. See you next Monday.