On Fog

Last weekend, I made plans to hike the High and Low Tor trail in New Jersey with a friend.  It was a rainy, cloudy morning, but weather reports indicated that the skies might clear, so we decided to chance it.  I swung by her apartment to pick her up and as she was walking over to my car, I immediately noticed that her eyes looked red from crying.  She got in the car and told me that her boyfriend for the last year had broken up with her the night before, and her heart was broken.  She cried as we drove to the trailhead, telling me about the complications in the relationship and her dashed hopes.  I listened and empathized with her heartache.

A light rain continued as we set out on the trail, and she cried some more.  We reached the first summit,  and then the second summit, and she cried some more.  She asked questions and looped through all the red flags and signals of a relationship going off the rails, and cried some more.  She cried through our return trip and our lunch afterward, until at last I think her tear ducts dried out and she couldn't cry anymore.

We saw no one on the trail that day, and the rain never really fully stopped, and I got to thinking about fog.  My friend's relationship had certainly put in her a state of fog, and I've been there.  Edit that: I am there.  When you've worked so hard to push through the obstacles of your relationships or your job or whatever it is in your life, and you climb the mountain as we did that day to arrive at the top and a viewpoint that looks like this, it can be discouraging.

But as I was walking through the rain and the fog, I remembered a Carl Sandburg poem that I loved when I was little:

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking 
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

The key phrase here being "And then moves on".  I think it's easy when we're in a state of fog to think that we've lost our bearings, or to fall into the belief that our inability to see the horizon means that we're hopeless.  But if we just wait, the fog always does move on.

And sometimes it moves in the most stunning, magical ways: