You Don't Need to See the Whole Mountain

This is the third time in eight weeks I've come at the same problem, and I want to be honest about that. In week three we looked at the hill you keep circling and I said the circling costs more than the climb would. A fortnight ago we were out on the bog and I said you're waiting for a certainty this sort of decision never produces. Both of those are true. Neither has got some of you moving, and I've been sitting with why. Here's the thing I think I'd been missing. Wanting to see the whole mountain isn't really a request for information. It's a request for a version of the climb where you get to skip being a beginner. Because if you could see the entire route, you could plan it, and if you could plan it you'd never be caught out, and you'd arrive at the top having somehow never once been a novice. Which is the one way up that doesn't exist. And that matters more for you than for most people. You've been the capable one since school. Which sounds like a blessing, and is actually a gap in your training, because it means you've built a life almost entirely without the experience of being visibly incompetent in front of witnesses. Chris Argyris found something like this when he studied management consultants and expected them to be the best learners in the building. They were the worst. Because they'd almost never failed, they'd never learned how to learn from failing. The folklore this week is cairns. The heaps of stones on Scottish hills that do three different jobs, and the thing all three have in common. There's the plain one, which is waymarking across ground where the line isn't obvious. There's memory, and the old blessing *cuiridh mi clach air do chàrn*, I'll put a stone on your cairn, which means I won't forget you. And there's the tradition where each man placed a stone before a battle and the survivors took theirs back afterwards, so that what remained was the exact number of the dead, and nobody had to count. Every one of those was built by somebody who isn't there. Which is how you actually cross a hill you can't see. Nobody has ever done it by knowing the route. You walk to the stone you can see, and the next one appears when you get there, and never before. And the card is the Page of Wands, the youngest and least experienced figure in the suit, standing in a desert with a sprouting stick and no plan, looking at the one living thing in his hands rather than scanning the horizon. Nothing in that card is embarrassed about him. There's a practice at the end about naming the audience you can't bear to be a beginner in front of, and giving yourself a bad-at-it allowance. Next week the year turns and we go somewhere warmer, with the Sun. **This week's card:** the Page of Wands. The beginner, holding one living thing, in a desert, going anyway. **Take the quiz** **You already know. So what are you waiting for?** Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.