Reinhold Messner's six lives.

This genuinely feels like a different life - not better,
or worse, but certainly different. Young, free and
climbing in the Pyrenees some time in 2006.

I'm home alone this week. Anita, Lara and Iliya are visiting the Johns clan in Traverse City for two weeks and, short on holiday, I'm limited to joining them for the second week.  What to do?! Faced with some rare time alone I am, as my MBA-holding friend Paul might say,  suffering from analysis paralysis.

It isn't actually even that long since I was last home alone.  Anita took the girls to the US last August, which was less than a year, but seems like a lifetime ago. So today, for the first time in almost a year, I slept in until 9am.  I woke feeling dreadful! I think my body has genuinely adapted to 6.45am starts.  I've realised that this will be a weekend of other strange sensations for me: reading a novel during daylight hours, lazily digesting the morning paper over a bacon sandwich and a coffee in a local cafe, sunbathing without having to supervise small children, simply doing nothing without any pressing requirement to do anything, writing my blog. And there's an equally strange - and certainly lonelier set of experiences to be had - coming home to a silent house and not being able to ask Anita about her day, walking into Iliya's room at 10pm to find an empty cot, waking up this morning to my alarm clock rather than Lara asking for a mango smoothie.  

Time on my own has given me a glimpse back to a previous life - a quieter, more relaxed, more carefree time before children and responsibility and deadlines and bedtimes.  But that life was also less entertaining, less challenging, certainly less full and definitely less fulfilling.  A friend asked me recently whether life with children was better or worse than before.  He's expecting his first child later in the year  so I had to think carefully about my answer. I decided in the end just to be honest. In someways it is worse: less spontaneity, less flexibility, more planning, more responsibility.   But in infinitely more ways it is better - specifically it is richer in ways I still can not adequately define, but can only really be experienced.    

Life goes in stages, and one of the best things about life is knowing that whatever stage you're in right now, you can choose at any time to move into another stage. And - and this is the best bit - you have no idea what that next stage will be like. It can be anything you want!  Reinhold Messner, the famous alpine and Himalayan pioneer, mountain legend and all-round grumpy Italian famously declared that he would live six lives.   Life one was his youth - his rock climbing life.  Life two was his high-altitude life, completed when he realised the pursuit of ever-more challenging and extreme mountaineering (including the first ascent of Mount Everest without oxygen - completed solo no less) was probably only going to end one way. Life three was spent as a polar explorer;  life four was devoted to investigating the myth of the Himalayan Yeti; and life five was lived as a politician, serving a term as a member of the European parliament.   Messner's sixth life will, apparently, be his retirement, which will include amongst other things building a museum and possibly crossing a desert.  An eclectic life-career to say the least.

I like Messner's philosophy because it tells us that we can do whatever we want, and be whoever we want to be.  And that thing - that person, that identity - is dynamic, not fixed.  It can change over time, and that change is within our control.   I don't know how many lives I've had - the first life of my youth, spent studying and learning (often the hard way); my second life as a city worker, lawyer and materialist; my third life of my late twenties and early thirties spent falling in love, getting married, learning to become a climber and a father; and my current life, in which I take my career in a totally new direction, move to Asia and strive to keep everything in balance.  I'm hoping this life will also involve more flexible working, more exploring Asia, more climbing and more adventure.  My next life will hopefully involve buying a mountain retreat, spending as much time with my family in the outdoors as possible, and continuing to learn.  As to what comes after that - who knows.  That is I guess what makes life so exciting.  As Reinhold Messner himself said, if the outcome of the journey is known, then it isn't an adventure.