Changing the route doesn’t mean giving up on the destination.
There is something reassuring about having a plan. You know where you are going, you know what you need to do, and you have a route and a timeline to work towards. If you are anything like me, you probably have a few backup plans as well. But then reality turns up, and reality rarely cares about the plan you carefully put together.
Project Can’t has reminded me of that more than once. When you are taking on a challenge that already sits somewhere beyond what most people expect you to be doing, planning matters. Preparation matters. Equipment, training and the people around you all matter. But there comes a point when you have to stop asking, “How do I make the original plan work?” and start asking, “What do I need to change so I can keep moving forward?”
Those might sound like similar questions, but I think there is an important difference between them.
The Mountain Doesn’t Care About Your Plan
One of the things I love about the mountains is their honesty. They don’t care about your job title, the story you have told yourself, how motivated you were when you started, or what you wrote in your training plan six months ago. When you are out there, you have to deal with what is actually in front of you: the terrain, the conditions, your equipment, your body and the team around you.
Sometimes what is in front of you simply doesn’t match what you prepared for. That’s when things become interesting, because changing the plan can very quickly feel like failure, particularly when you have spent months or even years working towards something. Without realising it, you can become invested not only in reaching the destination, but in reaching it in exactly the way you imagined.
I’ve had to challenge that thinking myself.
There is a certain irony in creating something called Project Can’t and then expecting everything to go according to plan. The whole purpose of the project is to challenge assumptions about what is possible, and that means challenging some of my own assumptions along the way.
I’m taking on mountains using biomechanical KAFOs and doing it with a body that doesn’t always behave in the way I would like it to. There isn’t exactly a handbook sitting on the shelf telling me how all of this should work. There are things we can prepare for and things we can test, but there are also things we are only going to discover by getting out there and actually doing it.
That is part of the process.
It would be easy to look at an adaptation and think, “Well, that’s not how it was supposed to happen.” But increasingly, I find myself asking a different question: who decided there was only one way it was supposed to happen in the first place?
Resilience Isn’t Just About Pushing Harder
I think we have developed a slightly strange relationship with resilience. We love stories about people who refuse to stop. Keep going. Push harder. Dig deeper. Never give up. I understand why those messages resonate, and there are certainly moments when determination and the willingness to keep pushing are exactly what you need.
Experience has taught me, though, that real resilience is much more complicated than simply refusing to stop.
Sometimes pushing harder is exactly what is required. Sometimes it is the worst possible thing you can do. There is a difference between determination and stubbornness, and recognising that difference can be incredibly difficult when you care deeply about the outcome.
For me, resilience isn’t blindly continuing with something because changing direction would hurt my pride. It is being honest enough to recognise when something isn’t working and then having the courage to do something about it. That might mean changing the equipment, changing the training, changing the timescale or changing the route. It might mean asking somebody else for help. It might even mean stopping for a while, learning from what happened and coming back with a different approach.
None of those things automatically mean you have given up. Sometimes they are exactly what allows you to continue.
This Isn’t Really a Lesson About Mountains
The more time I spend on Project Can’t, the more I realise that many of the lessons aren’t really about mountaineering at all. The mountain simply has a very effective way of making them impossible to ignore.
There have been other moments in my life when the original plan changed dramatically and continuing exactly as before simply wasn’t an option. Those experiences taught me that you can spend an enormous amount of energy fighting reality, wishing things were different and trying to force yourself back onto a route that no longer exists. Or, eventually, you can begin working with the reality you actually have.
That doesn’t mean you have to like what has happened. It doesn’t mean pretending everything is positive or trying to turn every difficult experience into an inspirational quote. Some situations are difficult. Some are unfair. Some hurt. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make us resilient.
But eventually, you arrive at a question that has become incredibly important to me: What can I do from here?
It’s a simple question, but it changes the focus. Instead of spending all your energy on what you cannot control, you begin looking at what you can. You start looking for the next decision, the next adaptation or sometimes simply the next step.
The Destination and the Route Are Not the Same Thing
Perhaps the biggest lesson Project Can’t is reinforcing for me at the moment is that I can be completely committed to the destination without being emotionally attached to one particular route.
If the route changes, we adapt. If something doesn’t work, we learn from it. If we discover a better way, we use it. The purpose hasn’t disappeared simply because the process looks different from the one I originally imagined.
I think that lesson extends far beyond Project Can’t. We are very quick to create rules around what achievement is supposed to look like. We have ideas about how somebody should work, how they should lead, how quickly they should recover, how they should overcome adversity and, apparently, how they should climb a mountain.
But different doesn’t mean lesser.
Using support doesn’t diminish an achievement. Adapting equipment doesn’t diminish it. Taking longer doesn’t diminish it. Finding another route doesn’t diminish it either.
Sometimes we become so focused on doing something the “right” way that we forget to question who decided what the right way was.
What Happens Next?
For Project Can’t, the answer is simple: we keep moving forward, but we do it intelligently.
There will be more testing and more learning. There will probably be more things that don’t work, and there will undoubtedly be moments of frustration along the way. I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with that because Project Can’t was never supposed to demonstrate that I had all the answers.
It was always about asking a much more interesting question: what becomes possible when we stop accepting “can’t” as the end of the conversation?
Sometimes the answer will be determination. Sometimes it will be technology. Sometimes it will be teamwork. Sometimes it will mean completely redesigning the approach. Most likely, it will be a combination of all of them.
That’s the journey I’m on.
The plan may change many more times before I get where I’m going, and I’m learning that this isn’t something I need to fear. A changed plan isn’t automatically evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is evidence that you’ve learned something.
So if the plan has to change, the plan changes.
The important thing is remembering why I started.
Because changing the route doesn’t mean giving up on the destination.
Sometimes changing the route is exactly how you get there.