The first time I hiked a real mountain trail, I tried to go straight up. There was a clear path doing sensible switchbacks across the slope, and I ignored it, because the direct line looked faster and I was impatient. I made it maybe twenty minutes before my legs gave out and I had to sit on a rock and reconsider my entire approach to inclines.
Switchbacks feel like a waste. You walk a long diagonal away from where you are going, then turn and walk a long diagonal back, and your forward progress per step looks pathetic. But the grade stays gentle enough that you can keep going, and keeping going beats the heroic burst that strands you on a rock. The trail is longer on purpose. The length is the mercy.
I think about that constantly during hard stretches of life. The instinct, when things are difficult, is to attack the slope directly. Work harder, sleep less, push through, fix everything at once by sheer force. It feels noble and it occasionally works for a day or two. Then your legs give out, except now the legs are your patience or your health or your marriage, and the recovery costs more than the time you were trying to save.
A hard year is a long climb, and long climbs are not won by intensity. They are won by a pace you can repeat tomorrow. The question is never how much can I do today. The question is how much can I do today and still do again the next day and the day after that without breaking. That sustainable number is almost always lower than your ambition wants, and almost always higher than your fear claims.
The other thing about switchbacks is that you cannot see the summit from most of them. You turn a corner expecting the top and find another stretch of trail. If you measure your progress only by the summit, you will despair, because the summit hides for most of the climb. Better to measure by whether you are still moving and still on the path. The summit takes care of itself if those two things stay true.
And you rest before you need to, not after you are wrecked. Experienced hikers stop for water and food on a schedule, while they still feel fine, because they know that the moment you feel depleted you are already behind, and digging out of a deficit on a mountain is brutal. Apply that to a hard year. Rest is not the reward for finishing. It is the equipment that lets you finish at all.
I am not a natural at any of this. I still look at the direct line up the slope and feel the pull. But I have sat on enough rocks halfway up, lungs burning, watching more patient people walk steadily past me on the longer path, to know how that story ends. Slow and repeatable gets to the top. Fast and heroic gets to a rock.