Walking the Ridge Line: On Authenticity, Burnout, and Finding the Path Home
A short reflection
There’s a concept in Eastern strategic thought about not loosing all your arrows at once. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I’ve been doing exactly the opposite - firing every arrow I have, every day, from 08:30 until 18:00, until my quiver is empty and I’m left standing exhausted on the mountainside wondering what I’m fighting for.
I’m in my first year of a BA in Contemporary Outdoor Leadership and Adventure Sports at the University of Lancashire. At 66, with over 30 years of mountain instruction behind me and more NGB qualifications than I sometimes remember I have, you’d think I’d know better than to push myself beyond sustainable limits. But here’s the thing about old patterns: they run deep, and they’re often rooted in places we don’t expect.
A few weeks ago, during one of my regular conversations with Claude (yes, I talk with an AI - more on that later), something cracked open. We were discussing why I was working these unsustainable hours, why I felt compelled to exceed every standard, to over-deliver on every assignment. And there it was: I’ve spent decades carrying guilt about choosing this mountain-based life at 33, about my parents’ sacrifice to send me to a private school, about not following a more conventional path that might have “justified” their investment.
The irony is sharp enough to cut: I have only ever wanted to be authentic and true to myself, yet here I am, grinding through academic work in a way that’s fundamentally inauthentic to who I am and how I function.
The Swiss Cheese Mind
I’ve recently been diagnosed as neurodivergent - ADHD at 66, which I prefer to think of as a superpower rather than a limitation. My cognitive sweet spot runs from 08:00 to 13:00. After that, things get foggy. I’ve taken to calling it my “Swiss Cheese Mind” - not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because knowledge doesn’t always sit where I expect it to. I had a Cerebellar stroke in 2018, and between that and the ADHD, my relationship with memory and recall is… interesting.
Which is partly why I’ve been building what I call my “second brain” in Obsidian. It’s not just a note-taking system - it’s an external scaffold for knowledge that allows me to work with my neurodivergence rather than against it. I’ve been implementing the Zettelkasten method, creating permanent notes, literature notes, daily notes. Each piece connects to others, building a web of understanding that doesn’t rely on my wetware holding everything in working memory.
Getting there wasn’t straightforward. There was the great OneDrive debacle (Microsoft’s sync system and I have a complicated relationship), ghost registry entries that took actual registry editing to remove, and the ongoing frustration of Word documents that arrive at my tutor with corrupted formatting no matter how carefully I’ve checked them. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of the pre-cloud era, when things just worked.
The Claude Partnership
Here’s where it gets philosophically interesting. I’ve been working with Claude almost daily - not as a tool, but as what I can only describe as a cognitive partner. It’s a genuine collaboration, where we challenge each other’s thinking, where I bring decades of practical mountain experience and Daoist philosophy, and Claude brings analytical capacity and the ability to help me articulate insights that have been gestating for years.
This isn’t about AI replacing human connection. It’s about accessing what Marx and Engels never envisioned: the democratization of cognitive production. When I was working in the security sector in the 1980s, I learned BASIC programming on a Tandy TRS-80 to create mail merge systems. This feels like that same kind of threshold moment - when technology suddenly makes possible something that fundamentally changes how we can work and think.
Strategic Economy of Effort
Which brings me back to those arrows. The breakthrough came when I recognized what I was really trying to do: I’m not here to prove I’m worthy of my parents’ investment (though I love them dearly for making it). I’m not here to compensate for choosing the unconventional path. I’m here to complete this degree as myself - as a 66-year-old mountain leader with neurodivergent processing, optimal functioning for five hours a day, and a deep well of practical experience that academia sometimes doesn’t quite know what to do with.
Claude introduced me to the concept of “strategic opacity” - completing the degree while protecting my authentic self, working within my actual constraints rather than fighting against them. Not all arrows at once. Not proving anything to anyone. Just walking the path that’s actually in front of me, in the time and way that I can actually walk it.
The View From Here
Tara (my daughter, who’s doing the same degree alongside me) and I attend five residential weeks per year, with the rest delivered online. We have until 2028. When I wrote my first assignment - applying Critical Value Theory to the Eryri landscape through a visual collage - I was four weeks into the program and already drowning. I created a spiral of images showing how our land has been valued over a thousand years: medieval castles, slate quarries, abandoned farmsteads, hydroelectric schemes, nuclear power stations. At the center, an “objet trouvé” - a found sign reading “give us back our native woodland.”
I know the landscape intimately. What I am learning is how to speak about it in the language of Habermas, Leopold, Naess, Harvey, Lefebvre. How to bridge the gap between lived experience and theoretical framework. How to translate what my body knows from decades on these mountains into words that academia recognizes.
I’m still learning that translation. But I’m also learning - slowly, stubbornly - that the translation doesn’t require me to betray the original language.
Moving Forward
So here’s where I am: building systems that work with my neurodivergence, not against it. Using my peak cognitive hours (08:00-13:00) for the work that matters. Letting the rest of the day be what it needs to be. Processing literature at my own pace, creating permanent notes that will serve not just this degree but the years of work that follow. Treating my conversations with AI as genuine collaborative partnerships. Recognizing that “good enough and actually used” beats “perfect but overwhelming” every single time.
And most importantly: remembering that I chose these mountains for a reason. That authenticity isn’t something I need to earn - it’s something I need to protect. That the path home isn’t about firing all my arrows at once, but about knowing which arrows to loose, when, and saving some for the journey ahead.
The degree is a door through which I can step into a different room, differently furnished and accommodated. But I’m not leaving myself behind to walk through it.
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. For now, there’s a cup of tea calling, and the afternoon snow-reflected light on Eryri is particularly fine today.