Looking Down, from the Top of the Y

     So yesterday a few friends and I hiked the Y.  (If you haven’t been to BYU, and don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s this giant “Y” on one of the mountains behind the BYU campus.  You can hike up to it and look over the whole valley.)  I remember hiking the Y when I was younger when my parents would take my brother and I to their old school.  I remember the fun times we had and how my younger self thought that when I made it to BYU, I would hike the Y everyday for a workout.  Man, my younger self was so wrong.  I don’t know why I could not remember how steep it can be at some points of the hike, but hiking it on Saturday was a little bit of a struggle.  The steepness, plus factor in the thin air, and we had ourselves an adventure.  My group hiked up the trail, constantly looking to the Y to guess at our distance from it.  It was all so worth it, once we reached the top.  The view was breathtaking.  You could see everything!  The beautiful Utah Lake, BYU, countless homes and neighborhoods.  It was amazing.  On the way back down, I was thinking about that, the journey to the top, and it made me think of our lives.  We are always moving, always moving forward in our lives, day by day, second by second.  When climbing, I could have kept going up, or quit and gone back down it.  That’s much like our choices in life.  You can keep going up, no matter the trails you are facing, deciding that the end goal is so much more worth it than your current situation.  On the flip side, you can quit, decide that life is too hard and think that you’re alone and won’t make it, so why try.  I prefer to think like the first option. Now, I know there are hard times, heck everyone has rough patches.  I know in many instances, I have thought to myself that whatever trial I was going through was so much bigger than it really was, that I was hopeless.  But working through it is so much more rewarding than letting it consume you!  You can learn so much from hardships, gain so much faith from them.  And never think that you are alone.  You’re not.  When looking back, they are worth going through, just so that you can come out on the other side stronger than you were in the first place.  While sitting on the top of the Y, I was looking down at the trail we traveled.  Now it may just be me, being an optimistic person, but I was filled with such a confident spirit gazing down, that I was positive that I could hike that trail again and again, that it was easy and that the journey was worth it.  I bet that’s how it will be for us, when life comes to a close.  We will be done with it, looking at how far we’ve come.  Hopefully through we’re looking down at it, and not at the bottom looking up.