That this would be a discussion-based trip was established on the first day. And when you’re on a road trip with someone as storied as Nick, you find yourself covering all kinds of unexpected ground. There was plenty of silence, sure, but the two of us were quite rarely outside spitting distance of one another the entire time. It’s difficult to overstate just how much Nick and I talked about over the course of the trip. But until then I am alone.” -Nick Ige, Dec. “I am scared, and want to love so hard, I want to love and be loved. Nick driving the beloved Suzuki from Sydney to Thredbo. The dark days, as luck would have it, felt so very far away. There was so much spontaneity to attend to - so many jokes to crack and smiles to share, so much fresh air to breathe and moonlight to swim in - that I ran out of questions to ask that night. By the time Nick and I walked the short distance back to the Suzuki, parked on top of a cliff overlooking Blue Pool, the clouds had cleared and we had the good fortune of viewing a full moon before drifting off to sleep. It just so happened that the same thought struck another four geezers from the pub, and so by sheer accident, Nick and I made four new friends, swinging and sending laughs into the balmy evening air long past the pub’s closing. Self-doubt, impatience, hatred - all seem so trivial when you’ve run a dozen miles before 9 a.m., or better yet, when you’ve spent the entire day outdoors with a friend.īy chance, there sat a playground with swings across the street from the Bermy pub that many pints had rendered deeply enticing. Much is out of our control, but how capable we are of responding is not. Nick paused, took a sip from his lager, and encouraged me to think back to Blue Lake and what luck really means, to consider more fully the significance of opportunity and preparedness. Nick has told me countless times that to fight back against depressive thoughts and win, you must simply “do hard shit.” But that night, it occurred to me to ask Nick a new question: “Do you believe in free will?” He assured us that the drinking demographic of the 1,500-person town always flocks to “the Bermy pub,” so that evening we ate, drank, and rubbed elbows with Bermagui’s finest. On our afternoon in Bermagui, we asked a fisherman at Blue Pool where the best bars were. Nick, ever the open book, will share all of this if you ask. I disclosed this with Nick a few miles after leaving Charlotte’s Pass, the trailhead for Mount Kosciuszko, and in turn he shared with me the somber contingencies of leaving the army - anger, losing your closest friends to self-harm, breaking down when you watch a particularly realistic war movie. They offered a solution to my dark days and responses to my endless volley of questions. Ige ’25 and Kevin Fischetto ’26 first approached me in the fall, I was immediately drawn to their project for this reason. I am continuing to climb and suspect that, to some degree, I always will be. This does not mean, however, that the obsessive thoughts are completely gone, that the wounds aren’t still raw, or that questions remain unanswered. I can confidently say that my relationship with my body is healthier now than it has been in a long time. The story of college for me, at its core, has been about asking where Charlie went and finding him again. In the spring of my freshman year, I was diagnosed with anorexia. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” -Winnifred Crane Wygal, “Serenity Prayer”
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