Why

Not the answer. Just the question, up close.

I’m still in Kulusuk. Feet still broken. Head still loud.

Someone asked me why I do something like this and I’ve been sitting with that for two days. The honest answer is I don’t 100% know yet. And I’m not apologizing for that. The not knowing is the whole thing.

Here’s what I do know.

Knowledge happens at the extremes of human experience. Not in the comfortable middle where everything is managed and predictable and fine. Not in the place where you know what’s coming and you’ve got a plan for it. At the edges. In the places where normal stops working and something else has to take over.

I’ve believed that for years. It’s why I started doing things like this.

The thing about extremes is they come for you either way. Life has a way of finding the edges for you whether you go looking or not. Illness. Loss. Failure. The thing that arrives without warning and takes the floor out from under you. Those extremes are real and they strip you down just as completely. They produce the same raw material. The same knowledge. The same perspective you can’t get any other way.

But you can also go looking.

You can choose the hard thing before the hard thing chooses you. Walk toward the edge deliberately, eyes open, knowing exactly how much it’s going to cost and going anyway. There’s something in that choosing that matters. Not because it makes you tougher than the person who had difficulty forced on them. It doesn’t. But because it puts you in charge of your own reckoning. Because it says I’m not going to wait to be broken down. I’m going to find out what I’m made of on my own terms.

That’s the self imposed part. And I think it’s important.

The whole crossing was extreme. Not just moments of it. All of it. From the first step to the last. Real hardness. Not the performed kind. Not the guy with the attitude and the loud opinion and the ability to drink until 3am and still function. That’s not hard. That’s just noise. Real hardness is sitting on the edge of a sleeping mat at five in the morning in the middle of an ice sheet, feeling the nausea rise before you’ve even moved, because some part of your body already knows what’s coming. Already knows it has to go back into those boots and do it again. Ten hours. Twelve hours. Another full day on feet that have had enough.

That nausea was real. Every morning. The knowing before the doing. The moment between waking up and standing up where everything in you wants to find a way out of what comes next.

There is no way out. You zip the boots up, strap yourself in, and you go.

And this morning, back in a hotel room, proper sleep in a bed, I stood up and the feet were still there. Still swollen. Still saying something. I thought for a moment maybe today would be different. It wasn’t. And something about that, this physical thing that won’t let go yet, keeps pulling me back to the ice in a way I can’t quite shake. It won’t let me move on until it’s ready. I’m starting to think that’s not a bad thing.

I’m still finding out how. The cacophony in my head right now is everything at once. The contradiction of never wanting to do this again and already thinking about the next one. The unprocessed emotions sitting in a pile I haven’t sorted through yet. The feelings that came without warning on the ice and the ones still arriving now that it’s quiet. All of it thrown together like something tipped over inside me and I’m just standing here looking at the mess.

And the next one. God help me. It’s already there before I’d even finished this one. Maybe solo. Which would mean harder. More remote. More of everything that just broke me. I feel slightly sick saying that. Nervous in a way I recognise. The same way I felt standing at the start of this one.

Which probably means it’s exactly the right thing.

Was it worth it. Yes. Without question.

Do I know exactly why yet. No.

I’m still standing in it. Feet throbbing. Head loud. Asking the same question I left with.

G.