Trampolines at Altitude

The thing I brought home from the Dolomites this summer was trampolines. Not a metaphor. Actual trampolines, one sunk flush into the grass beside a wooden rifugio, with kids in hiking boots taking turns on it.

After that I couldn't stop seeing them. Slides. Little zip lines. At one hut, twenty tiny pairs of Crocs lined up in every color, waiting for whatever game came next. These are serious mountains. The huts are full of serious hikers with poles and taped ankles and plans. And somebody still decided the middle of the mountain needed a playground.

My daughters and I indulged at every hut we could. Midday wine. Minestrone. At one, warm brioche buns with apricot glaze and fresh yogurt from the cows grazing nearby. We meant to take a picture of them but we ate them too fast.

It's smart business, obviously. Families stop. Families order lunch. But that isn't what stayed with me.

What stayed with me is where they put them. Not at the summit. Not back at the car. In the middle, where the walking is hardest and the view isn't the payoff yet. The whole mountain assumes you'll need to stop before you've finished. It assumes somebody in your group will need to bounce.

My instinct runs the other way. On a good hiking day I want the next hut, then the next. I treat rest as whatever's left over after the effort, and I do the same thing at work. The climb gets scheduled. The rest gets the scraps.

My girls are grown now, no longer the ones on the trampoline. Watching other people's kids fly into the air, I thought about how much of life we spend earning a rest we've already been handed.

So I've started building the huts in. I script that I laugh every day. It’s not something that happens while I’m pushing for the next hut. A hallway conversation that runs long. A walk to lunch instead of lunch at my desk. The phone call I've owed a friend for a month. They almost never feel productive while they're happening. That used to be my argument against them.

Somebody hauled a trampoline up a mountain. They put it halfway, on purpose, where the climbing is worst.

Thought for the Week: Where in your week is the playground? Not the reward at the end, the pause built into the middle. And if there isn't one, what would it take to put one there?