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Higher than Everest

We were descending Mt. Chicon in a bit of a blow. At about 17,000 feet the verglas (clear ice on rock) had separated from the rock. My twin ice hammers slipped like sharp knives through very thin peanut brittle. Air. Space. Adrenaline. Fear. A sudden stop. The belay, threaded through a single ice-screw, came snug on my chest harness. I dangled, bruised but unbloodied, bobbing over a five thousand foot drop of blue ice. We climbed on and made the summit. We had completed the first ascent of a major summit in the Cordillera Urubamba of Peru.

Our chests swollen large with pride, our eyes swollen shut from snow-blindness, we stumbled down from the heights. The reassuring sponginess of the vegetation beneath welcomed us back to the land of living things. We had survived.

As their llamas scurried by, a pair of scruffy, soot-blackened Quechua kids, black eyes wide with amazement approached cautiously. "De donde vienen?" they asked. (Where have you come from?)Ê "De arriba. Las monta–as." we answered in heroic tones, pointing to the snowy summits.Ê The munchkins in the pointy wool hats seemed perplexed. "Porque? No hay nada arriba." (Why? There is nothing up there.)

In that instant I knew they were right.

My idea of adventure had been altered forever.Ê There is nothing up there. There is only a fleeting moment of ecstasy, the beginnings of a story to be told later and the realization that the most dangerous part of the journey remains. Abandoned by the adrenaline angel of the ascent, beset by the dark demons of fatigue, one must now go down. It is exactly during such mountainous descents a number of my closest friends have, over the years taken that fatal slip.

That pint-sized philosopher in pointy headgear had given me a gift, a reminder of one of life's ultimate truths:Ê no matter the endeavor, what begins as a life-wish, a desire to experience the heightened awareness, endless vistas and elevated perspective of a tightrope walk along the brink, may end as a death-wish unless we take the lesson to heart and learn to move on. The most exciting events can become little more than deadly habits. It is the momentum, the courage to keep moving forward from one challenge to the next that keeps us going.

When you stop and think about it, adventure is really inside you. Or it is nowhere at all.

Sharing a horse cart on the way to the train station in the Turkestani oasis of Turfan, delayed in a traffic jam of desert Uhygur Tribesmen on camels, an Australian lady once turned to me and asked, "Have you ever seen a place so stupid, dusty and boring?" Conversely, I have labored along side people in the most mundane of work environments who consistently exhibit the symptoms of true adventurers: openness, spontaneity, wonder, curiosity, joy. What is it that allows some of us to confront even a routine job or natural disaster with a natural buoyancy and expansiveness while others find boredom and discomfort in the most technicolor moments of their lives? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at the University of Chicago uses the word "flow"(first coined by an interviewed climber) to describe this positive state of mind. His studies of a variety of individuals involved in diverse activities, including rock climbing, dance, chess and basketball, demonstrated that, "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is something we make happen."

Remarkably enough, out of 4,800 responses collected regarding the occurrence of "flow state" experience, the vast majority of reported occurrences came not from leisure but from work. In other words, whenever we undertake a high-minded goal that requires our full concentration, engages our creative juices and whose outcome is uncertain, we find ourselves eligible for the kind of experience we thought was reserved exclusively for that weekend white-water raft trip or that once in a lifetime expedition to beyond.

If the bad news is that the mountain top experience does not necessarily reside atop the mountain, the good news is, it is right here and available to us all the time. Whenever we open our eyes to it.

I still recall an opportunity I had in the late sixties to hear Willi Unsoeld , one of the truly great philosopher-climbers of our time, speak about the expedition that placed him among the first Americans atop the highest summit on the planet and the depression that had plagued him afterward. "You've climbed the biggest mountain in the world. What's left? Disappointment. You realize you have accomplished your dream. It is all down hill from there." He paused and looked over the crowd. "You've got to set your sights on something higher than Everest."

Maybe I'm fooling myself. Maybe it's because I turned forty last year. Or got married. Or maybe because I just don't seem to have the free time I used to have to go traipsing around the world. But genuine adventures of Himalayan magnitude peer at me from corners of my life I never expected. I'm discovering that the premises I need to vacate are not geographical...but psychological - habits to be jettisoned, depths of honesty in relationships to be plumbed, heights of creativity clamoring to be scaled. And, interestingly enough, unlike the exploits of my youth, these are adventures that seem to affect others in positive ways as well. Not just the adventurer.

My suggestion: lets not wait for those two weeks a year to live lives charged with a touch of derring-do. There are adventures of the spirit that equal those of the flesh. Important ones. Small acts of courage that change the world. Why get hooked on vacation-time metaphors when the real thing is right in our face everywhere we look?

It is an oft-overlooked but undeniable fact that when we begin to edge our daily lives more and more in the direction of our highest dreams, every waking hour becomes an opportunity for adventure. From where we stand every day, our higher-than-Everest challenge is clearly visible... If we care to look.

That's not the adventure of a weekend.Ê That's the adventure of a lifetime.