Solopreneur Lessons from a Mountaintop
My husband and I had just climbed back down a fire tower in the Adirondack Park, the beautiful views still fresh in our minds as we reached the rocky platform below. A woman approached to take her turn clambering up the narrow, steep, zig-zagging staircase. She said she wasn’t sure she could make it and I assured her that the views were worth it. (Many people who fear heights aren’t able to make the final ascent up the rickety old structure to get the very best view.) She explained that she knew the beauty that awaited but her instability made her unsure she could make the final trek. We made eye contact and immediately realized the other looked familiar.
It took a few exchanges of how we may have vaguely known each other and then it hit us! We had rented a cottage a couple doors down from hers for a few consecutive years after we got married in the area. We brought our boat, dog and eventually our son every year but we hadn’t been back in awhile. We were genuinely shocked that she remembered us, and even more incredulous that she recalled our anniversary. How incredibly sweet!
Dee (I’ll call her) was a memorable woman because, as a person I estimated to be in her 60s, she walked with a walker. She appeared to have a difficult time moving around her lakefront property but found comfort and an ease of mobility in the water as her two little dogs watched from the shore. It was hard not to be mesmerized by the peace she found in the water. We had struck up a conversation with her one day while driving by on our boat, and she shared briefly about her degenerative condition that limited her ability to do the activities she enjoyed most - except for swimming in the lake. She didn’t say it with a tone of disappointment or self-pity but rather as a matter-of-fact statement that she wouldn’t let define her.
Now, atop a mountain a few years later, here she stood with only a hiking pole. She explained to us how she hadn’t been up this mountain in over 15 years and was excited to be getting a taste for her love of heights and adventure again. She pointed to another woman sitting on a rock a little distance away whom, she explained, she had met just the day before at the post office in town. They talked about how they had both wanted to do this hike but knew their families would not go at a pace slow enough to accommodate them. Dee declared that her family would have told her that she can’t do it and she’s crazy to even consider it. She’s disabled, after all. I felt my heart break as she told us these words.
Here she was - not only at the top of a mountain but now also determined to crawl her way up the steep stairs to get to the top of the fire tower. No one was going to tell her not to. After all, she chuckled when explaining that her family didn’t even know where she was and she had no plans of telling them until she was safely back down the mountain. We took this photo of her to commemorate the occasion and waited as she came back down so we could get her phone number to send it to her.
We reveled in her joy. We stood in awe of her grit. We admired her tenacity.
The entire hike back down the mountain, we thought of Dee and talked about how inspiring she was. It was hard to believe that the same woman we saw hobbling with a walker just a few years prior was now valiantly reclaiming herself on a mountaintop, and that we had the privilege of witnessing it! We were in disbelief that somehow our paths crossed on the same day at the same time at the top of the same mountain. What are the odds?! It truly felt like somehow this was meant to happen.
There are a few lessons that I took away from this encounter that I think are especially relevant to solopreneurs:
Be kind to others, they might remember it (and you) far longer than you realize.
Don’t let others define your limits, only you get to make that call.
Never. Stop. Dreaming.
It can be easy to get caught up in our lives as small business owners and take little things for granted. I’m incredibly thankful that we ran into Dee on that beautiful early fall day. It was a powerful reminder that life is bigger than we usually stop to realize.