I recently went on a trip to Costa Rica which consisted of ten days of mountain biking, hiking, and surfing - and I came back shattered and sore and so happy. The last time my sister and I went on a trip it was cabin camping in New Hampshire, in which we managed to high center our rental car, melt my shoes, snowshoe in the dark in the wrong direction for an hour, lose an iPhone, and have everything freeze (including our contact solution). That was also an incredibly awesome trip.
The point to this is that life should be full of those ups and downs - those high highs and low lows. During the week, it's amazing how much of a flat line my life is - I'm almost indifferent to it. These are also the precious hours of your life that go by where you can't remember for the life of you what happened. I was talking to a co-worker yesterday, and asked her -- what'd you do this weekend? And she couldn't remember. What a way to have entire days, weeks, months, years go by without anything notable having been done! It's so important to slow down time a little - to do it all. I remember a line distinctly from the documentary, "Tiny": "Time is a non-renewable resource."
This video below made me think of my up and down life philosophy. Bruce Kirkby stand-up paddle boards from Vancouver to Victoria and asks why? Why struggle through it? Because the super lows of screaming muscles and thinking you're not going to make it and the super highs of making it to a beautiful campsite make life that much more richer and worth living. Pleasure earned is so much purer.