Light and shadow on the Gran Sasso

Now and then I turn round to see if I can still make out the group carrying on upwards, but I can't see a thing, my eyes are fogged up, from the effort and my generally poor physical state a thick film forms in front of my eyes. At times everything is blurred.

My harness squeezes my belly, it hampers my movements and almost hurts, and the embarrassment is made worse by the fact that this morning I still haven't been to the loo.

The button on my trouser fly pops open, I feel crammed into a pair of trousers that just two months ago were loose on me.

I'm irresponsible, I love the mountains but I still think I can take on mountaineering as if I were a lad. I'm 40 and I'm still playing as if I were 19. I have two children waiting for me at home and here I am playing irresponsibly... I think... you can't expect to be a mountaineer without a minimum of training, without a minimum of mental clarity... which right now I clearly no longer have.

I carry on down slowly, measuring every step, every laboured breath. My rucksack feels like a boulder, it's splitting my shoulders and dislocating my ribs, I feel pain right down into my chest. And yet there's nothing different in this rucksack: no more and no less than what I've always carried with me. Today it seems to weigh ten times as much.

As I go down I keep thinking that I've got too many irons in the fire, winter mountaineering, the crag, ski mountaineering, mountain biking...

When I get home I'll sell everything I don't need and devote myself more to the things I do best. I'll sell skis, boots, ice tools and all that gear I'll never use, that I've never used, that keeps gathering dust in the cupboard under the stairs. I'll sell everything but... it's not because I'm angry, anger at the mistakes I've made is one thing, the reaction is only fair... I've got to do something, after all...

I realise that all the things I wanted to do just won't fit into one life.

You can only do a few things well in a lifetime... the others we barely brush against.

Climbing back up a low hill I start panting and I think that to do anything at all in life you have to toil. Even a little hump takes effort, training takes effort and consistency, even keeping faith with the choice of doing a bit of mountaineering takes effort. Everything takes no small amount of toil.

I walk across the green meadows of reflection, the “flowers of evil” grow in my thoughts and I think about death... I think that... thank God, to die, I realise, and I say at least for this, you don't have to toil much.

And I think back to a friend I recently lost touch with, and I think back to the times he'd told me: “just hiking”, “just trekking”... for the rest it's already too late. Mountaineering, climbing, none of it is possible any more. They remain occasional activities that can't be pursued all the way. I didn't believe him... but perhaps today I believe he was at least a little bit right.

It's when everything goes wrong that you understand the great, priceless value of all those other times when everything went well. If everything always went well then every outing would be the same as the next. I can see all this clearly, and abandoning the climb up the Via Sivitilli was a conscious choice.

I don't even feel foolish, I'm just disoriented. It's like when you're moving about in a dark room you don't know: someone suddenly switches on the light and you discover how small the room you were moving in really was. I'm disoriented because I've understood the limit of the things you can do... and not do.

There's no point beating about the bush, my life will perhaps be just trekking, and rare, sporadic little mountaineering adventures... maybe at the expense of some good Samaritan willing to haul me up by force.

I've reached the car and I listen to the radio to fill the time while my companions finish the hike. There's a debate on e-books. The question is “whether” and “how” the number of readers can be increased and whether e-books can help the book market with this.

E-books, paper books, magazines, newspapers, films, documentaries. Learning a new hobby, learning to use a new device, a new tablet PC, a laptop. Spending time watching digital TV, sport, training, going to pay the bills, meeting relatives and friends, and then the old friends you haven't seen for ages, holidays with the family, the museum with your wife, an exhibition, shopping, a day of relaxation and well-being at a wellness centre. Music, comics, writing a few pages of a diary, watering the flowers on your balcony. Someone even came out with growing a little vegetable patch at home. Discovering European cities on short weekend breaks. Savouring a bottle of wine with friends.

When you hear people talking on the radio or on television it would almost seem that everything can fit into a life. It isn't so. It's all false. The hardest thing, in this hysterical, stressed-out modernity, is understanding your own limits, choosing the things you love most, cultivating the best and sifting the rest...

And it's not the fault of the family, the baby bottles, the nappies, the children's fevers in the night, it's not the fault of birthday parties or work dinners. It's not the fault of catechism, the washing machines, the dirty dishes. It's not the fault of the living-room rug you have to clean at least once a year. It's not the fault of the car that broke down or the registered letter to post. It's not the fault of a relative's cancer... These are just the things of life. You can't throw the altruistic choices you make in life back in people's faces. You don't throw it back at others just because some of these were acts of altruism.

Altruism is freely given or it isn't altruism. You can't throw altruism back in people's faces, nor can you regret having made different choices.

Moral choices, the ones where you do something just so as not to hurt others, the ones dictated by a sense of duty, are a way in which we try to make our contribution to the world... so that everything goes well, everything works as well as it can and there's no one else paying a price in our place.

I have nothing to complain about. If I'm not trained today it's only because I had a different place in the world, a place that required me to do certain things for others. And it wasn't even hard to act for others. It was natural, logical... even pleasant.

It's true that I've often complained. Saying that I can't train because I'm doing this or that sometimes seems to be a way of throwing back in the faces of those around me the freely given nature of my altruistic actions.

Doing things for my family came easily to me. So I have to admit that in the end everyone does what comes easiest to them. We do this because first of all we necessarily have to answer to ourselves, to our moral make-up. And that we can't give ourselves. So we find ourselves with it and as it is... and we keep it more or less all our lives... My father always says “you can't will what you will”.

What came out of these two days spent on the Gran Sasso? A lot of friendship, a few very good photographs, a barefoot walk in the snow, much reflection, and cultivating patience... watching light and shadow move across the Gran Sasso.