Thoughts on Hiking on Kili. 3 of 5: Purgation.

​The term seems medieval and entirely negative with gastro-intestinal overtones even. But consider all the "stuff" that rattles around the brain, soul and psyche. How about all those patterns of thought and frames of thinking that seem so resistant to change? All those agreements you made with yourself? All those memorialized memories? Under the right conditions, the container breaks: the clinging haunts fall away, the long assumed surrender to what was just going to be the way it is ends and a newness is felt. Under the right conditions. One doesn't need a 24 hour flight, and hiking in extremis to encounter such a freedom. But these conditions just don't fall into your lap. Constant breathing patterns, hours upon hours of intensive effort, with no obvious relief anywhere, leaves you liable to a container break. Once open, you just don't want to go back, no, not about going back to the people you love whom you can't wait to embrace again, but the patterns of thinking, the acquiescence to a norm assumed, the regimen of expectations. You see things differently, again. E.B. White had it just right, as he reflected upon a brutal encounter during long night of gentleman farming, in an essay, Death of a Pig, he observed, "I discovered, though, that after having given a pig an enema, there is no turning back, no resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles."