Matt Padwick's Blog, page 2

Are you ready?

The church was white-washed stone standing on a rocky rise sheltered from the ocean by a belt of palms and Caribbean pines. The doors were open and fans turned overhead and condensation dripped down the windows. There was a missionary priest there that evening. Ed had arrived in the middle of a song, the place was rocking.

The song ended and a woman in the congregation stood up. “The sixteenth of December 1986 that was the day I started running for my life . . . Lord Jesus! I know I don’t have a voice but I want us all to hear this” With that the celebrant launches into a song and immediately she has the whole place behind her.

The place is rocking. Everyone wearing their best clothes. Including jackets and hats. The song ends to make way for another testimony which is met with a universal “Praise the Lord!”

The lady at the lectern reads out the first line of the next song. The brooch pinned to her black beret says JESUS in glittery letters. A man clears his throat and spits out the fire exit door. Two guitarists and a drummer start up, after a few bars they are playing the same song, just in time for the voices to blend in. It’s loud and it’s inspired. And the place was rocking again.

Ed had scored a job as caretaker of a field station in the Bahamas during hurricane season. All the American staff were on vacation, but the locals were friendly. Emily was the breakfast cook at the field station. She was 75 island-years old, so sweet and kind and quiet and humble and against-the-odds-happy, living in a wooden shed in that belt of palms and pines.

She levers herself up from the church pew and with her eyes clenched tightly shut, and without waiting for the microphone she sings out “I tell you. I tell you! When the Lord comes for Emily Johnson she ready!”

It takes the roof off the place, everyone is shouting at Emily

“Amen!”

“Yes Jesus!”

“Save me Jesus!”

Ed was a believer of Neil better to burn out than fade away Young and James live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse Dean. Emily I ready Johnson was messing with his head. Here was an apparently happy person who was happy to die. Is that not a contradiction?

**  time passed **

Ed was now beginning each day by sitting up in bed and saying a prayer. Except he really didn’t like that word, so he didn’t use it. Prayer is what religious types do. When he sat up on the bed each morning he made a heartfelt wish. One of the first times he did this, out of nowhere, Emily J came to mind;

“You have to feel the feeling of your prayer otherwise it’s not answered…”  

They had been sitting on the porch looking at the clouds and dark water beyond the reef. Emily would often sit there in the evenings, humming and gently rocking.

“…Ask and ye shall receive – within reason o’course, just don’t be askin’ for nuthin’ stupid.” she added.

“Receive from where?” Ed had asked

Emily stopped still and went silent, heaved herself round and looked at him squarely, smiling kindly,

“From the other side of life o’course.”

She went back to her prayer and swaying.

Are you ready? is an excerpt from RUNNING CONTRA DICTION and the flight of a soul athlete –  available on Amazon and all good bookshops

cheap thrill

I can’t believe what I am seeing. A young man in a wingsuit is flying directly at a pinnacle of rock at 200km/hour. He is aiming at a two-metre wide hole in the pinnacle – attempting to thread the eye of a rock-needle – with his body – flying – at 200km/hour.

A video camera is bolted to his helmet. Why is he wearing a helmet? If he makes a mistake a hard hat will not help him.

Somehow he succeeds, opens his parachute and lands safely in a field of goats. The film I am watching has 8 million views.

A wingsuit has extra fabric between the legs and under the arms, it is designed to help base jumpers ‘fly’ further and for longer before opening a parachute. However, even in this era when extreme is the new norm, the fatality statistics for wingsuit flying stick out like a broken thumb.

Matthias Feuz is a farmer in Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland. His fields are directly below a popular cliff jump-off point for wingsuit flyers and he has personally witnessed deaths.

“One day I heard a loud bang. A base jumper had crashed into the rock face, fallen to the bottom of the cliff and died there,” he told Swiss television. “It was the most horrible experience of my life, watching someone die right before my eyes.”

So what makes someone jump off a cliff in an expensive onesie?

Is it driven by the manufacturers of the specialist kit we need to participate in these activities, or the makers of the mini-cameras that can be strapped to our helmets so our exploits can be recorded, or the social media sites that make it possible for us to share our adventures with friends and anonymous others around the world? No. We risked our lives attempting crazy stunts a long time before YouTube was born.

So why?

In the euphoric post-stunt interviews (inbetween the Wows and the Whooping) these daredevils will say something like;

“It breaks the monotony of everyday life……What else is there?…There is a moment of clarity, of spaciousness, your senses are fully open…It’s when I feel truly alive.”

But the satisfaction is short-lived. In the next breath they are looking back to where they came from and want to do it all over again.

Matthias Feuz adds; “I feel angry that someone could put their life on the line like that for just a few seconds of thrills – that they don’t have more respect for their own lives.”

It is an unsettling contrast. While refugees flood into the West, risking everything to taste the freedoms and advantages that we enjoy, many of us are ready to throw it all away for ‘a few seconds of thrills’.

My own crash was not just physical, it was mental and emotional, and I can attribute much of my recovery to Buddhist philosophy and meditation.

Now, having some experience in both worlds, I see how the thrill is not in the extreme activity itself but in the heightened awareness – the high – it generates and demands.

In the heart of all that derring-do – the speed and the angles – there is the deep stillness, space and clarity of a mental state free of thoughts and emotions. I call it Big Mind.

Having trained in meditation for many years I have experienced this heightened awareness in ordinary activity, and proved for myself that The High doesn’t have to be life threatening, expensive and fleeting – it is freely available. And you can abide there.

That’s the good news.

The problem is that meditation – sitting quietly and watching my mind without reacting – is not easy, in fact it takes extreme discipline and courage. More discipline than I had needed to work hard and save all my money so I could buy expensive gear and travel to a far away places for wilderness adventures. And more courage than I ever needed to jump off a cliff, kayak down a waterfall or climb mountains.

So it’s a myth to say meditation is boring! Actually meditation is the modern equivalent of slaying the dragon and a battle I am still engaged with.

Time for some more good news.

It’s such a relief to know, especially now as my body is slowing down, that if I tune in to it Big Mind adventure can be anywhere – and all the time!

It’s maybe a year since I watched that video of Uli Emanuele dressed in a wingsuit flying through the eye-of-a-rock-needle, so last week, when I found myself staring at a blank computer screen and tapping my fingers on the desk I decided to search for it again. Instead I found the headline – Base jumper tragically films his own death. Uli Emanuele died aged 29, on 17th August 2016. May he rest in peace.

And may we all find peace in life.

father-time, mother-ship

The sun rises slowly, to a bird’s call and the goat’s bell, and the lap-lap-lap of the tide on the pebble beach. There are no roads here, and everybody sets there watch by the morning ferry, which is late again.

The sound of her metal ramp crashing down on the concrete dock reverberates around this natural amphitheatre. The Mother-ship opens her mouth, it’s a can of worms; arriving foot passengers mingle with ticket waving boarders, men with wheelbarrows come out of the shade, and little boats with smoking outboards edge closer. There are calls and shouts from people in authority. Everyone is in authority.

The little boats skit back across bejewelled water. The barrows disperse down the board-walk and up back alleys. Her mouth closes. She turns and leaves. 

Peace returns

and remains

until the same time (more or less) tomorrow.

Loutro, Crete, 2017

phase change

phase change is an excerpt from RUNNING CONTRA DICTION and the flight of a soul athlete –  available on Amazon and all good bookshops

One school lesson that made an impact on Ed – probably because he drank so much tea – was about boiling a kettle.  And the transition from water to steam known as “phase change”.  He learned that water boiling at 100°C needed more and sustained energy to become steam.  In order to become stable it had to make the leap, and it was as if the water had to be cajoled and persuaded until it finally surrendered. 

So Ed could feel wretched and be dumb and mistake-ridden, but that was no reason to pull the plug on all his efforts, it could still all be progress. It’s just that the change had to be complete, all the way through, before it was noticeable. For courage and perseverance he liked that quote from Thomas Merton:  

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.

Sometimes difficult outer circumstances were required for the inner strength to manifest, and to purify our being.  Frustration was a signpost, not a dead end.

phase change is an excerpt from RUNNING CONTRA DICTION and the flight of a soul athlete –  available on Amazon and all good bookshops.

messing with The Truth

Nothing stays the same. Everything is impermanent (or permanently changing).  It’s a natural law. In the fruit bowl, as I write this, the pear is ripening.  So why does change feel so uncomfortable?…

 Maybe because I resist it – applying the brakes or grabbing the steering wheel – instead of enjoying the ride.

the problem with friends

I want to change.  I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to change something about themselves.  I’ve met a few who would change everything.  Which brings me to the problem with friends…  

They like me the way I am.                    [Which is why I like them back.]

If I truly want to a better person, a good adversary can be my best friend.

 

 

 

heavy

Heavy is the first chapter of Transpose -a self-styled revolution (March 2017) available here.

The car lurched forward and stalled on a patch of bare earth under the shade of a tree outside a prefabricated house in the Florida swamplands. The driver’s door opened and a body fell out. Then the passenger’s door opened, a second body hit the ground with a thud. There was no sign of blood, just the creaking and cranking noises when very hot metal starts to cool down.

A dark-haired man and a blond woman were standing on the porch of the house. He walked towards the car. She went back into the house to get a jug of water.

“The disadvantage….with this car is…” said the red-faced driver between gulps of cold water, “…is the engine overheats… and the only way to stop it… overheating… is to have the heater on full … which cools the engine down but heats up the car… a lot.”

Outside it was humid and thirty degrees. Inside the car, which was a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu Sport Sedan, it had been nearly treble that.

A few minutes later the driver had recovered enough to stand up and make some introductions.

“Hi Jake. It’s Ed. And this is Tracy.”

Jake looked blankly at the couple who had just arrived.

The driver tried again. “Jake?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember me now?”

“No.”

“I’m Ed. From the Bahamas. You said to drop by if I ever came to Florida.”

“Oh. Ed. The Bahamas. Yeah. How are you? And Tracy was it?

“Yep that’s right. Ed – and Tracy.”

“Okay. Tracy and Ed. Hi. Yeah. Pleased to meet you.”

The blond woman was glaring at Jake. Jake got the message.

“Oh yeah. This is my… this is Jayne.”

s

Jake and Jayne’s relationship was on the rocks. They spoke to their guests, but they didn’t speak to each other.

While Jake was outside faking busyness Ed and Tracy were sitting at the kitchen table watching Jayne pop ice-cubes into a jug of Tang. Tracy was dressed in a fresh Metallica vest, with a combed mohican and freshly plaited goatee beard. Ed had tied his dreadlocks back, he was wearing his best shorts and one of Jake’s t-shirts – just until the washing was done.

Jayne had already decided the visitors were decent people, polite and with a sense of humour – quite different from the man she had married – and had asked them if they wanted to go into town for a meal and some wine.

“Eh, sorry, we can’t, we’re going for a beer with Jake’s softball team.”

“Ah well,” she said, “good luck with that. The bars round here are full of toothless folk covered in tattoos… Oh, I mean ugly tattoos, not body art.”

Tracy held up a hand as if to say no offence taken. Jayne had already paid compliment to the celtic designs covering his arms and legs, and admired most of his many piercings.

There was nothing soft about Jake’s softball team. Despite being thrown off the league two seasons ago they still met up for practice at Ronnie’s Bar two evenings a week, which was in preparation for ‘match days’ which lasted for most of most weekends. Jake was the last of them to get his divorce through.

That was all on a Sunday.

On Monday morning the boys had tropical hang-overs. Jake scraped them up and drove them to The Old Ponderosa Fish Camp. It was like a movie set; feathery vines hung from the cypress trees accentuating the stony silence. Jake wanted Tracy to help design and build a new jetty while Ed was teamed up with Ronald to demolish and remove the old toilet block.

Ronald was an ex-marine, a veteran of every conflict for which his country deemed him eligible, a career that had spanned the golden age of American warmongery. And when he retired from the marines he became a mercenary. Now he was properly retired. Helping Jake break things was just a hobby.

Ronald had sweet inked under one of his nipples and sour under the other. He told Ed that. Ed would never have dared to read it for himself.

Demolishing the toilet block was easy. Ronald reversed the truck into one wall and it collapsed like a pack of cards. Unfortunately Ed was inside the building doing a recce at the time. Fortunately he had been standing by a window, the glass long-gone, so when the walls collapsed inwards he jumped out of the window. He was unhurt but a little shaken, not too shaken to hide though.

Ronald circled the rubble calling for Ed a few times before shrugging his shoulders and setting off to tell Jake his new assistant had been killed in the line of duty. Which is when Ed came out from behind a tree.

“Hey Ronald, just taking a leak, now, what’s next?”

“Load this here truck,” said Ronald neither pleased nor relieved.

Each time the truck was full of debris Ronald drove them to the dump, hunched over the steering wheel and chain-smoking as they rumbled down the narrow tarmac alleyways that divided the swamp.

At lunchtime they went to the gas station at Molasses Junction for a filled roll and a can of coke. The proprietor was sitting on a rocking chair, knitting. She finished the row and set down her pipe before getting up to serve them.

At the end of the day on the way home, they nearly crashed into a crop-spraying bi-plane that was banking into a turn to start a new row. “That fuckin Frankie has inhaled too much DDT…”

Pulling up at Jake’s place Ronald spotted the car parked on the bare earth under the tree. “It’s a 350 V8, that dual exhaust would give it two hundred horsepower. We call ’em the Heavy Chevy, ” he said.

“It’s a micro-wave bloody oven that’s what it is!” said Ed. Just looking at it made him sweat. Instinctively his face went into the driving frown which had helped stop the perspiration running off his forehead and stinging his eyes. Ed explained the overheating issue to Ronald.

“Ronald, do you know anyone who wants to buy a Chevy-shaped micro-wave oven?”

“Mmmm. You might get something for it in winter. In Canada.”

“We’re not driving it to Canada. We’re scared of it. It’s like being in hell already…”

Ronald walked round the car sizing it up.

“What the fuck kind of license plate is that anyway man?”

“It’s a temporary tag. It was part of the deal.” Ed explained how they’d been talking with the car salesmen when a uniformed debt collector showed up, ushered the salesman into the sales office and berated him for ten minutes.

This had given Ed and Tracy time to think. The Heavy Chevy was already the cheapest car on the lot, but it was more than they could afford. And a license plate would cost more than the car.

When the salesman emerged looking a foot shorter Ed faked disinterest while Tracy pushed for half price – but including a temporary license tag written out till the end of the month which would give them a thirty day grace period to find the money for a real license plate.

Then Ed entered the negotiation saying he would only agree if they also received two more thirty day tags – blank ones – which they could fill in and slap on as needed. The car was sick, with a life-expectancy of much less than ninety days, but it would be a handy insurance to have just in case. Of course this was all against the law but the beleaguered salesman had to agree; he needed cash.

Ronald liked the story. “You guys are illeegaal!” he said exposing all of his gums. Suddenly they were family. “I’ll take a look at this car for you. If you send me a post-card from Canada.”

“Uh? No way! We’re not even going to Canada, that was your idea.”

“Have we got a deal or is this fucked up car of yours going to rot under this here tree?”

Jake had already warned Ed and Tracy that there was no god-damn way that this illeeegal wreck of a god-damn car was going to rot under his god-damn tree.

Ed had to think quickly. He couldn’t.

“It’s a deal. A postcard from Canada it is.”

Jake was an alcoholic. Jayne was taking night classes to better herself. That, in a nutshell, was their problem.

On Friday lunchtime Jake went missing. On Friday night Jayne took Ed and Tracy to a comedy club in the city. It was brilliant! In the bar afterwards they met the evening’s best comedian. He bit his finger nails continuously and wasn’t funny at all. They got back really late. Jayne looked at Tracy a moment longer than was necessary before announcing she was going to bed. It was Ed’s turn on the couch but Tracy got there first so Ed laid himself out on the floor. The house was quiet for a few minutes. Then Jake arrived home and somehow pulled the fridge down on top of himself while putting milk on his cornflakes.

On Saturday night all four of them sat on the long sofa. Jake was at one end, Jayne was at the other, the lads were in the middle. The beer was warm because the fridge was broken.

TV was mostly ads. Jayne was staring at a magazine until something worth watching came on.

Jake got Tracy to help him bring out a second TV from the bedroom, they put it next to the first one, wired up his Playstation and loaded the Formula 1 game. So on the left screen they had advertisements blaring and flashing at them, broken up by chat shows and soaps. And on the right screen they had Formula 1 with the settings on really hard so only Tracy and Jake could cope with it. Tracy had spent years on a sofa learning to cope in front of his Playstation. Jake had obviously wasted a lot of time getting really good at it too.

Inspired by a TV news item Ed attempted conversation.

“America is crazy.” he said. “I don’t mean crazy, I mean y’know mad. You can’t drink alcohol in public but anyone can own an automatic weapon.”

“Some people can do more damage drinking.” said Jayne.

Oh. They went back to silence.

That was Saturday night. On Sunday morning Jake announced he was going to Bobby the Dinosaur’s 50th birthday party. He looked at Ed and Tracy. Jayne was looking at Ed and Tracy. Ed and Tracy looked at the floor. They knew this was a test – one they couldn’t pass.

Out on the road a car horn sounded. Everyone looked at Jake. Nothing he said now could make any difference. He said nothing. He closed the door behind himself and skipped off down the dusty path to play with his friends.

At five that afternoon there was a phone call. Jayne picked it up and listened for thirty seconds while her head inflated and reddened, then she slammed the handset down without having said a word.

She disappeared into the bedroom and crashed around for half a minute before emerging with a small suitcase.

“I’m sorry you had to see this. I’m leaving. Goodbye.”

The little house shook as she slammed the door. Ed spilled his can of warm beer. Tracy was winning the Australian Grand Prix at the Adelaide Street Circuit but the commotion had punctured his concentration – he hit a barrier on the Dequetteville Hairpin losing his front wing.

“Shit! What just happened?” he said twitching on the sofa (lowering a shoulder as he took each bend and flicking his right foot when he changed gear).

A minute later the phone rang again. Tracy crashed again. “Shiiiit!”

He threw the console to the ground. His race was over.

Ed picked up the telephone handset and nervously put it to his ear. The caller sounded a bit like Jake. It was Jake. What was left of him. He was on a pay-phone, he needed to be collected from Papa Joe’s Bar, he started giving directions while Ed was looking for a pen, Ed got some of it down but then Jake must have run out of change and the phone cut off.

Ed and Tracy drove Jake’s pick-up deep into the swamp-jungle looking for Papa Joe’s. All the cross-roads looked the same – they went straight over some, turned left at others, sometimes they turned right, until they gave up looking for the bar and decided their goal was to make it out of there while there was still gas in the tank. Which is when they found Papa Joe’s.

As they walked towards the shack the night-time jungle noises were overtaken by the sound of a jukebox. On the porch an empty rocking-chair was gently rocking. There was a sprinkling of blood on the wooden step. The door was wedged open with a flattened Budweiser can.

Ed was unshaven, had dreadlocks and was wearing board shorts. He looked like most of the other women in there.

Tracy had Celtic tattoos, face and body-piercing, a mohican, goatee and a sunburned neck. There was a triangle of ‘females’ buzzing around him in seconds.

“Woo wee ain’t he pretty.” said the first.

“Ooh there’s one hell of an accent you got there.” said the second who was six-feet-two not including her floppy straw hat. She flashed her gums at Tracy. “You know how to handle yourself, don’t you boy?”

Jake was nowhere to be seen.

There was a sign over the bar saying Tequila Sam’s.

A slow song came on. The ladies started fighting over who was going to dance with Tracy while their mothers were focussed on Ed.

Ed and Tracy got home a little before daybreak. Jake was asleep next to the Heavy Chevy on the patch of bare earth under the tree outside his prefabricated house.

You know things are serious when there is no humour.

At lunchtime Jake and Ed and Tracy congregated in the kitchen around a cereal box, taking a handful and passing it on. Ed looked up from a Reader’s Digest magazine; “You know that famous conundrum If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it still make a sound?…”

“For Christ’s sake Scrambles pack it in. Have you no respect for a decent hangover! Sorry Jake, he does this sometimes. Often in fact.”

“I don’t get it.” said Jake. Poor Jake. The story of how the lads escaped from Tequila Sam’s had momentarily cheered him but now, again, he looked like a fallen tree, broken and alone in the forest of his fucked up life.

“Well,” said Tracy, “what he said, said in a different way is, if a man speaks and there isn’t a woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?”

“Ah, it’s a tongue twister, I get it.”

In the afternoon of that day Jake phoned Jayne at her mother’s place. Jayne asked him why he wasn’t working. Jake said he wasn’t at work because he had a head-ache and a fever, because yesterday, at the party, he’d been bitten by a spider.

summit of achievement

summit of achievement is an excerpt from RUNNING CONTRA DICTION and the flight of a soul athlete –  available on Amazon and all good bookshops

Ed shifted in his seat, looked around and found what he was looking for – a distraction. One hundred and fifty pages of it, mostly photographs. On the shelf at his shoulder was Everest – The Summit of Achievement.  Ed flicked through some facts and acknowledgements in the introduction but was then held by the smiling portrait of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet who had written the foreword.

While acknowledging Hillary and Tenzing’s successful bid to reach the summit in 1953 as an inspiring and positive example of what human beings can achieve, the result of great planning, teamwork and individual effort, The Dalai Lama also pointed out that it was another instance of human ability to dominate the world we live in.

While messages of congratulation flooded in from around the world to celebrate this proud achievement – which coincided in Britain with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – the Tibetans were struggling to come to terms with the Chinese Communist occupation.

The Dalai Lama added that the mountains were sacred to the Tibetans. Rather than climb to the top of them, a Tibetan would make salutations by offering juniper incense smoke in their direction and piously walking around them. They didn’t need to go to the summit – Tibetan vocabulary did not even have word for the top of a mountain.

If climbing the mountain was the only way to complete a journey, Tibetan travellers respectfully add a stone to the cairns at the top of the pass with a shout of “Lha-gyal-lo — Victory to the gods!”

A mountain was not something to be conquered but a place where they could meditate undisturbed, and conquer their minds.

At least as awesome as the story of climbing the mountain was the account of mapping India and the Himalayas and all formidable obstacles – physical, psychological, political and technical – that generations of cartographic teams had to overcome. It had cost a fortune in lives and money, and generated the most complex mathematical equations known to the pre-computer age.

Tibet had been a blank space on the world map for many years until, in 1856, a mountain inside Tibet called Chomolungma was surveyed from a viewing point in India and was found to be the highest mountain in the world. It was given a new name and became an object of obsession.

In was the era of empires and expeditions, Tibet’s anonymity was effectively over but somehow only a handful of Westerners made it into Tibet. Until 1904. In 1904 the Brits officially tricked and terrorised their way in so that they could keep a closer eye on other countries looking to expand their borders. And in 1921 the first reconnaissance climbing expedition was permitted, intent on scaling the world’s greatest mountains; the enormous difficulties and dangers involved only adding to the appeal.

Ed had trekked to Everest base camp, albeit seventy years later, and he could imagine the uneasy contrast; how the same object could stimulate quite different responses in human beings?  The line of pale-skinned and hairy mountaineers salivating over the mountain-prize walking passed the tents of the nomads of Beyeul Khembalung who for generations had survived by grazing their animals in these high pastures. For the nomads life was already a delicate balance, and then these self-indulgent hobbyists arrived…

The following year, 1922, the mountaineers were back, not for reconnaissance, this was the first expedition to actually climb Mt Everest. One of the conditions on the “passports” granted by the Dalai Lama was “no guns and no killing — including the animals”.  The visitors kept their word – the animals were not hunted and the mountaineers remarked on how tame the wildlife was. However, seven Tibetan porters were killed during this unsuccessful attempt, swept to their deaths in an avalanche on the slopes leading to the North Col.

Dzatrul Rinpoche, the Abbot of nearby Rongbuk Monastery, wrote, “I was filled with compassion for their lot who underwent suffering for such unnecessary work.”

Dzatrul Rinpoche was asking the question – Why? Many observers were asking the question — Why?  And George Mallory provided the famous answer: Because it is there.

Two years later in 1924, on the next unsuccessful attempt to reach the summit of Everest, George Mallory died because it is there.  At this point Ed found a book mark, a slip of yellow card-paper, he turned it to read the handwritten notations; “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal.  GM died because he couldn’t leave it there. He died like most of us will, trying to understand that basic human desire – to explore.

We see a mountain, and we need to stand on top of it. The Majesty is lost on us.  Like Adam who could not leave the apple on the tree.  We see the fruit as something outside of ourselves and need to own it.  That is where every story begins.

Ed said “Oh” out loud. It was an involuntary sound. He closed the book on his left hand, holding the yellow bookmark away from himself in his right hand, and shut his eyes, and hoped his head would not explode.

He paced up and down. Threw sticks on the fire. Sat back in the chair. He was relaxed. As relaxed as he could be. His right-leg bobbing up and down like a sewing machine. And his mind was calm, the only calmness he knew, just the standard undercurrent of constant thinking and distraction. He went back to the Everest book and Hillary and Tenzing’s triumph in 1953. Of course that was not the end of the Everest climbing story – how could it be?  The euphoria is short-lived, the mountaineers were already focussed on the next challenge. Next it had to be attempted with route variations and added complications, and without oxygen.

Another bookmark: Each success leaves them thirsty for more. Like drinking salt-water. Hardly an accomplishment at all. And then everyone wanted a go, and the trekking routes began to suffer the effects of mass tourism. Ed had been one of those “white-eyed visitors” looking for a high-point in their life. The book quoted a Sherpani from Namche Bazar who compared westerners to cattle. Happy to wander about aimlessly all day long, constantly getting sick, and how you had to lead them by the nose over difficult terrain or else they fell off the trail. But if you fed them well, they’d produce a lot of milk.  There was a contribution from the leader of an Everest Pollution Control Committee, who also happened to be the Abbot of Thyangboche Monastery, who said,

“Practical initiatives and measures for conservation were missing the main point, that only by changing the minds of those who come to Khumbu will they be able to stop the bad effects of tourism”.

Only by changing the minds. Sometimes when you heard something like that, the shock and awe was enough to open a door, and you could see and feel the validity of that truth. The Abbot of Thyangboche Monastery should be President of the World, not chairman of a litter campaign! For a moment Ed really understood something. He made a note. How we think creates so much distress and debris. Arrogance, anxiety and stress manifest in our outer world as ever more clutter and confusion.

 

Ed resented these Everest pioneers , maybe because they were a mirror for his guilt. These “conquerors” with their double-barrelled names and public-school attitude were more like gold-diggers than mountaineers. Then he found in the back of the book an appendix with all the different expeditions and a biography of the team members. Like Theodore Howard Somervell (1890 – 1975). Mr Somervell received a double first in natural sciences at Cambridge and qualified as a surgeon in time to be plunged into the horrors of World War I. As well as being an experienced alpine climber – he was a core member of the 1922 and 1924 teams – he was a talented landscape painter and musician. After the Everest expeditions he turned his back on a prestigious surgeon’s job in London and instead worked as missionary doctor in southern India for nearly forty years before retiring to the Lake District.

This didn’t really fit with the self-indulgent hobbyist picture Ed had been painting. Wanting to climb a mountain did not make someone a bad person, any more than being Tibetan made someone a saint.

 

**

summit of achievement is an excerpt from RUNNING CONTRA DICTION and the flight of a soul athlete –  available on Amazon and all good bookshops