Carolyn Highland

To know all these things, and to keep knowing them long after they are relevant to you. The strange dissonance of knowing all of the details of someone who is no longer as important as knowing those details conveys.

I don’t believe that there is only one person for everyone but I do believe that some are better for us than others, and that we owe it to ourselves not to settle, not to pick whoever’s around when our biological clock starts ticking.

Surround yourself with people who make you leap out of your comfort zone. Surround yourself with people who make you walk farther, climb higher, and go longer than you really feel like doing because they know the view at the end will be worth it.

Why does it so often feel like it has to be either or? Something has to be the deciding factor, something has to take precedence.

The only true data we have to go off of is what actually happened — everything else we have to remind ourselves is something we made up or something our friends made up. Accurate or off-base, it is a story we are telling ourselves.

It makes you hold on tighter, makes you look longer, makes you It makes the good parts feel better and the bad parts feel not so bad. It makes regular life feel a little bit like a miracle.

Singular actions do not define you. You aren’t each individual decision you make, but you are defined by the habitual ones, by the sum of all of them together.

As we age, with each passing year, the threads grow tighter, bringing us close to the people whose lives are destined to intertwine with ours in some way.

There is really only one way a mountain can be climbed, and that is by taking a step. And then another step.

My first time wasn’t magical, but it also wasn’t life-ruining. I didn’t feel regret. I felt relief.

I was driving on Route 16 between New Hampshire and Maine, ferrying my co-workers from the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Lakes of the Clouds hut to my house in Rangeley for a night of relaxation after closing the backcountry hut for the season.