Out of the Silence: After the Crash

by Eduardo Strauch Urioste

It was up to us to control our minds in the interest of sanity and hope, as these things were as essential for survival as food.

Life seemed to be reminding us yet again that we are never completely safe and that risk is an integral part of life itself.

What did I learn about love in the silence of the mountain? That it is the most important thing in life. And that if it is not present in some form, no action, however right it may seem, makes any sense at all.

you should put in effort only where it really matters, in areas that help bring you closer to your fundamental values.

mutual cooperation, the behavior that we most commonly find when we deepen our knowledge of living beings. So I believe that in the cordillera the team attitude that prevailed among us—supporting the weakest among us, each one offering his own special skills and abilities for the good of the group, his own knowledge and strengths, in sum, the best of himself—was not only driven by a superior feeling of human solidarity but was a matter of behaving in accordance with the nature that we ourselves were part of.

These stand out like jagged needles in the throng of my memories, although time is slowly smoothing them and making the jagged edges less sharp, just as it does to the peaks of the mountains.

At heart, what I’m talking about is nothing more and nothing less than self-knowledge, which is the clearest expression of spirituality. It is good to know who we are, for everything that happens to us happens within us. It is only in silence, and in the tension of that silence, that we can start to look inside. If we look hard and deeply and quietly enough, the sublime moment arrives, the explosion of gratitude for life. This is what I have come to understand: although nothing is certain, anything is possible. Something beyond us protects us, and it is found in solitude . . . in observation . . . and in silence.