The In-Between
Two weeks ago I rode up Mangart, the highest road in Slovenia. It was gated shut at the bottom - only cyclists and rangers allowed past the barriers - so the climb was almost empty, just me and a handful of others turning the pedals through the quiet. Near the top there were still patches of snow - only short stretches, but where they lay they covered the whole road, white and half-melted, firm enough, with rocks showing through. I got off and carried the bike across them, my breathing loud in the thin, properly cold air. Almost no one goes all the way up. Just me and the empty switchbacks, as though the mountain had been left open and forgotten, and I'd wandered up into it.
Today I'm back at sea level, in my flat in Prague, getting over a throat infection - angina, the strep kind, not the heart kind - that finally made me stop. Half my things are already in boxes. I'm staying put until I'm sure I'm not still contagious - the last thing I want is to carry this to my parents' door.
Two weeks, and everything's gone still. Two lives - one I'm climbing toward, one I haven't finished leaving - and I'm stalled somewhere short of both.
The in-between. Not the summit, not the valley, but the ground between them - the high camp, where you're committed to the mountain but still a long way from the top. That's where I've been living.
I left Aibility in the spring to start something of my own. I thought May would be a beginning - my own thing, contract work, a clean push off one ledge and onto the next. It's June now, and none of it has happened the way I pictured.
I'm still roped to the life I'm leaving. This flat, half in boxes and not quite emptied. A house that hasn't sold - and everything that comes next is waiting on that money. A divorce that's close but not yet filed. No job - just a couple of half-built ideas I'm not ready to name yet.
That's a lot of unfinished. You can't move fast with that much rope behind you.
Not all of the unfinished is weight, though. For weeks, back at my parents' place, my dad and I have been pulling my old childhood room apart and putting it back together - slowly, because he can't do what he used to, and because for once there's no rush. My parents are getting older, and somewhere in the dust and the wiring I've understood what it really is: time with my dad I wouldn't otherwise have had. He still keeps a clean site - tools wiped down, everything back in its place at the end of the day, even mid-demolition. There's plenty I can still learn from him. We're making a place I can come back to - somewhere to land for longer, and easier, when I'm in Czech and not on a mountain somewhere. A base. The first solid thing I've built in a while.
Right now I can't even get there - stuck a few days short of it.
And yet the new life has already started. That's the strange part.
I've been on the mountains - real ones. Mallorca in May, with friends, on a bike. We rode the big climbs, all but Sa Calobra, and one day put over two hundred kilometres into the legs - and I still had something left at the end, more than I'd expected on so little training. We got drenched, properly, more than once. A bug went round all of us that week - the cold, the soakings, take your pick - and we rode through it. Good food, and ice cream when we'd earned it. Then Slovenia, a couple of weeks later - the first real days of training for the summer's races, with Mangart on the second morning.
And there's someone, too. We met a few weeks ago, out hiking, and we've been messaging most days since. I won't write more about it here - it's new, and not only mine to tell. But it's part of what keeps pulling me forward.
Have you ever been ready for the next thing, and found yourself still tangled in the last?
I don't know what next month looks like. Where the work comes from. What pays for the road ahead.
But I know what I want now, which is more than I could have said a year ago. I want to travel, and explore, and keep finding roads like the empty one up Mangart. And I want work that pays for that instead of fighting it - a job, a contract, something that gets me on my feet again. A way forward that doesn't ask me to choose between the desk and the mountains.
Maybe the work isn't even behind a screen. I've spent my life there - architecture, leadership, IT - and I'm good at it. But there's a version of me I keep meeting on mountain roads. One who works from places, not offices. Who might guide people through them one day. I can't argue myself out of how much that pulls.
It's a lot to hold at once. The pressure of having leapt, and not yet landed. A heart that's somewhere new, and a marriage I still care about - one that has to end, kindly and completely, so that both of us can take full flight. Some days it doesn't feel like waiting at all.
I wrote once about the courage to slow down. I didn't manage it on my own - it took getting ill to actually make me stop. And honestly, it felt like the mountain telling me to stop. Actually stop, this time. Because even in Slovenia - the place I'd gone to slow down - I never really did. I just swapped meetings for mountains and kept going, climbing and walking dawn to dusk. Rest was never on the itinerary.
Maybe getting ill was the guidance I wouldn't give myself. A forced acclimatisation day. Because that's the thing about the in-between I keep forgetting - on a real climb you don't summit straight from the valley. You stop at the high camp. You let your body catch up to the altitude. The rest is part of the climb, not a detour from it.
There are fixed points further up the route, too. France in July, a stage of the L'Etape du Tour de France with tri club friends. The Tour des Stations in August, in Switzerland - a brutal one I've ridden once before. My auntie coming to stay. Small certainties pegged into all the open space, and reasons to get well and get moving again.
Half-roped to the life behind me, reaching for the one ahead, laid up at a high camp I didn't choose - waiting for my body and my circumstances to catch up to where my heart already is.
Not summited. Not turned back. Just acclimatising.