Translator: Sally Yassin Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
So I thought about walking on stage like this.
(Laughter)
Classic, right?
So my story begins where most stories do ...
the Arctic.
(Laughter)
Just over a year ago, I was attempting to ski to the Geographic North Pole.
There you ski on a thin sheet of ice
separating you from 4,000 meters of freezing Arctic Ocean below.
Sometimes, the ice is nonexistent,
and you have to jump into the frigid cold waters.
Every day you drag a 70 kilogram sled for ten hours a day
in the middle of howling winds and bitter cold.
One day, you ski 20 kilometers,
and when you finally get to your destination, completely exhausted,
you put your poles into the ground, you take out your GPS, only to realize
you're actually five kilometers behind where you started that day,
just because the wind decided to blow in the wrong direction.
Similarly, have you ever thought about how vast this expanding universe is?
Or looked at your life and pondered how much control you actually have?
Well, I have, and I felt completely helpless at first.
But then I realized that through embracing this uncertainty and lack of control
lies the source of infinite power, the ability to overcome any adversity,
and the key to answering one of life's most important questions:
Why are we here?
Sounds almost too simple, right?
The most profound concepts in life often are,
but we can't just read about them in books,
sometimes we have to experience them ourselves.
And often, we suffer, so we can truly learn to let go.
Some things in life you can't change or wouldn't want to change if you could.
Before I was born, my mother gave birth to two mentally disabled sisters.
When she learned she was pregnant with me, she took a leap of faith,
and decided not to do the test to know whether I had the same condition.
For nine months she simply held her breath,
and only let it go when the doctor came up to her with me,
uttering the same words she reminds me of every birthday for the last 37 years,
(Laughter)
a well-oxygenated boy.
(Laughter)
Ironic, but I will get to why later.
Growing up with my sisters meant that I had a very different childhood.
In my teenage years, while my friends were out having a good time,
I had to stay home and take care of them.
I didn't really appreciate it or understood the blessing back then,
but I was still very aware that my parents had been through so much,
and I didn't want to add to that.
So I became increasingly more introverted,
decided to keep all my emotions and thoughts bottled in,
which of course isn't a good thing
but perversely worked out really well for me when I took up mountain climbing,
where a great deal of mental strength was required.
Back to those fateful words of the doctor at birth.
You see, I was only well oxygenated until a certain point,
but then became severely asthmatic at age 11.
I used to wake up every night unable to breathe properly,
I couldn't complete one lap around the 400-meter track.
The illness prompted me to take up running six days a week,
a few weeks after which I stopped using some of the inhalers
the doctors had prescribed,
which then started a sequence of events
that let me to climb my first mountain in Switzerland at the age of 16
and fall madly in love with it.
It was actually the first time I'd ever seen snow,
I was taken aback by the beauty of the mountains,
the sense of peace and calm that I felt when I was there,
but also the challenge, not against the mountains or the elements,
because they are far stronger than us, but against my weakness of body and mind.
Up on the top of that mountain in Switzerland,
for the very first time I realized that if we're totally present,
if we work really hard at something,
we can influence the cards we're dealt in life.
It was actually on that trip to Switzerland
that I decided that one day I wanted to climb Mount Everest.
It seems like an irrational goal for somebody who hailed from the desert.
And I promise you that everybody I knew, including people closest to me,
made it their personal mission to point that out at every opportunity.
(Laughter)
But of course I became increasingly stubborn with every passing comment,
and after 12 years of working hard, training, and knocking on 100 doors
to secure the funding that I needed,
on 17th of May, 2007, at precisely 9:49 am,
I became the first Egyptian, youngest Arab,
to reach the top of the world.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you so much.
It was a huge turning point in my life.
I felt like I was doing something greater than myself,
like I was somehow giving back in a way that I couldn't quite grasp yet.
I remember reading an article that said Jamaica has a bobsled team
and now Egypt has a mountain climber.
(Laughter)
Just a few days after coming back from Everest,
I started to feel a kind of void
that would only back then be replaced by setting a bigger goal,
so I decided I wanted to climb the Seven Summits,
a project I began in 2008 and completed six years later.
Having just become the first Egyptian
to climb the highest mountain on every continent,
I literally felt on top of the world.
What's more is I headed back from Alaska to Miami
to reunite with my soulmate, Marwa,
and to witness the birth of our first baby girl, Teela.
I was home just in time for the birth.
On the 17th of June, 2013,
I held my wife's hand as she gave birth to our baby girl.
Just five days later I held her hand but this time in the intensive care unit
as the doctors tried to resuscitate her time and time again.
I remember hearing the doctors say, "We will try one last time,"
and I begged them to keep on trying,
but then I heard that same voice say, "Time of death ..."
and then the voice just trailed off.
And then they left me in the room to say my final goodbyes.
What do you even say in a time like this?
I kissed her hand and face, I remember saying all the things
that I thought I had an entire lifetime to say.
I remember asking for strength to keep on going,
and I remember asking for a swift death.
When I walked out of that ICU, I was nothing, not even a shell of a man.
The days, weeks and months to follow were full of darkness,
and I felt my life crumble around me.
The business that we built together seemed weeks away from shutting down.
Back home, away from everything, I would sometimes scream so loud
just to drown the voices in my own head.
How does one rise out of a struggle like this?
They say that even in darkness there is light,
and now I know this to be true.
It emerges ever so slowly, and grows even slower.
In my darkest moments, I didn't care what became of me,
but I still cared deeply about making my wife proud,
and being the best father that I could be.
Still, I would go to work for ten hours and get just ten minutes of work done.
And then I remembered an initiative that she started,
collecting used toys for orphans.
I decided to resurrect it in her name
and do a small initiative of my own of collecting 200 toys
during the holy month Ramadan.
I hit my target in just five days, so I raised it to 500.
I hit that in a week, so then I raised it to a 1000, and then 2000,
and then something magical happened.
Toys started flowing from all over the world,
from the US, China, Sweden, the Middle East.
Suddenly I was working 15 hour days.
By the end of the year, we had opened five chapters in five different countries,
received a grant, and won Humanitarian Project of the Year.
I'm proud to say that Marwa Fayed's Toy Run,
as it came to be known, is now a registered charity,
having helped more than 100,000 kids all around the world.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Until this day, when I'm working on the charity,
and I'm spending time with these kids,
I can feel her angelic presence around me,
and I know then she's proud of the work that I'm doing,
and she's smiling down.
That makes me smile as well.
The Toy Run awakened something inside me.
For the first time I could go back to work
and even revisit an old ambition of completing the Explorers Grand Slam,
which meant that now having done the Seven Summits,
I had to ski to both poles.
(Laughter)
I began preparations right away, and everybody told me it was too early
to take on something of this magnitude, and in many ways they were right.
In Antarctica, the long days, unchanging scenery and desolation just completely ...
tore my mind down.
Every day I would start skiing and get hit by this whirlwind of negative emotions.
I would start crying as I was skiing
as these painful memories came flooding in,
and just as fast as they would come in,
they would be replaced by almost this absurd euphoria,
and then nothing at all.
I remember sometimes someone would yell "stop,"
then I realized that my mind
had just been completely still and clear for over an hour.
In those moments, I was totally in flow, and it felt I could keep skiing for days.
I made the South Pole in great form.
To be honest with you, it felt like some kind of triumph over the mind.
Here I was, this broken man who had made it to this incredible place.
It felt like maybe after all this digging, and suffering, and pain
I had somehow shed enough layers,
that I was one step ahead of my troubled mind.
But nature has this habit of teaching us life's most important lessons.
And it seems that the North Pole, the last adventure,
would provide the hardest lesson of all.
You see my Marwa's first gift to me was this toy Smurf.
Pretty cute, right?
It was a defining element of our relationship.
When she passed away, the Smurf and I became inseparable.
It would sleep next to me. I would take it travelling everywhere.
Somehow if the Smurf was close, she was close.
Somehow I hadn't lost everything.
Having done so well down south, it felt to me like the North Pole
would be just a matter of time, a formality.
But on the second day of the expedition, we were hit by a severe storm -
high winds and poor visibility.
For hours we labored, dragging heavy sleds and negotiating very difficult crevices,
and put up camp in dreadful conditions.
When I got into my tent,
I looked through my clothes, but I couldn't find the Smurf.
I turned the tent upside down, but it was nowhere to be found.
I had to go back and look for it,
but how do you find a blue and white Smurf in the middle of an Arctic blizzard?
(Laughter)
Still, I was going to go look for it nonetheless.
I skied back into the storm, often looking back at camp
to make sure a lead doesn't open up between me and my team
separating us, and that would prove fatal.
For a few moments, I skied, then I realized that I'd lost my tracks,
and the futility of what I was trying to do hit me really hard.
I crashed down on my knees crying and screaming really loud.
I had just lost this little toy, but it seemed to me
like I was experiencing the same pain and loss all over again.
Why does life have to be so cruel?
Why can't I have this one little thing to keep me going?
And just like this I was broken again, feeling like an empty shell.
That evening as I laid down in my sleeping bag, it hit me:
There are no accidents in life.
Adversity is just an opportunity for us to grow.
We have to learn to let go.
I was being stripped of this one last material thing
I was holding onto at a time I needed it the most.
I had to understand that our relationship transcended this material world,
that it would never be severed.
The terrible conditions persisted, and we didn't see the sun for days.
On the last day of the expedition, five seconds before reaching the Pole,
something magical happened.
The clouds parted ever so slightly
and a beam of light about 50 meters in diameter shined directly above us,
covering us and the Pole, basking us in its warmth.
It was amazing because from where I stood, I could even see the shade just behind.
It stayed just long enough for us to hug each other
and to take some celebratory photos.
My guide, who spent more than two decades in the Arctic,
said it was one of the most beautiful experiences he's ever gone through there.
To me, it felt like some kind of magical reward,
that I'd finally endured and understood this difficult lesson.
I understood how to love and let go of attachment at the same time.
I still feel the pain,
but now I understand that she has her own journey,
and for now I have mine.
I've had a lot taken away from me,
but now I understand
that the universe ultimately has its own way of being benevolent and fair.
And now I understand that we're all here, together,
on this earth for the exact same purpose:
to heal, and to help heal each other.
I learned so much in the Arctic that day: an adventure, Nature.
My wife, both in her life and passing, have taught me much about this life,
about the power of vulnerability, the power of letting go,
about being more of the man that I can be, more of the man that she knew I could be.
My journey recently took me to the Amazon, the lungs of our planet,
and a medicine man who told me this beautiful story as a parting gift.
You see, in Amazonian culture there is no writing,
and so when a Shaman tells you a story, it becomes your own.
You're meant to share it
with as many people as you think are ready to hear it,
or it is lost forever.
The story touched me deeply.
And so today in my parting words, I would love to share this story with you,
because I believe we are all ready to hear it.
This is a true story that happened 250 years ago
on the great plains of North America.
This is a story about a medicine woman.
Her name was [Wukashni].
She was a healer for her people.
One day a young boy stepped out of his tipi
and walked along the grassy plains up the arroyo.
When he reached the top of the creek bed, he heard a mournful sound,
weeping and wailing.
He followed that sound up the creek bed
until he saw an old man standing in the water
weeping inconsolably.
He was shattered and tattered in every way.
The young boy looked at the old man and said, ''Old man, what's wrong?''
The old man replied, "I have this knife. It cuts me every time I touch it.
It cuts all those who come near me.
It has caused me nothing but sorrow in my life."
So the young boy looks at the old man and says, "Why don't you get rid of it?"
The old man replies, "I can't do that, I might need it sometime."
So the young boy looks at the old man and says, "Well, you can give it to me."
And the old man passes the young boy the knife,
and he dances away into the hills clicking his heels, (Whoosh) he was gone.
Thirty years later, a young girl steps out of her lodge,
and walks along the same grassy plain up the arroyo.
When she reaches the top of the creek bed, she hears a mournful sound,
weeping and wailing.
She follows that sound up the creek bed
until she sees an old man standing in the water,
weeping inconsolably.
He was shattered and tattered in every way.
The young girl looks at the old man and says, "Old man, what's wrong?"
The old man replies, "I have this knife. It cuts me every time I touch it.
It cuts all those who come near me.
It has caused me nothing but sorrow in my life."
So the young girl looks at the old man and says,
"Well, why don't you get rid of it?"
The old man replies, "I can't do that, I might need it sometime."
The young girl was just about to tell the old man to give her the knife,
but then she remembered her grandmother [Wukashni], and she said,
"Come back with me to the village, my grandmother is a healer,
she will know what to do."
The old man said, "Let's go."
And they walked back to the village hand in hand.
And when they neared the lodges, [Wukashi] came out to greet them,
and as soon as the old man saw her, he walked up to her and said,
"I have this knife."
And she said, "Yes, I know."
And then she turned to her granddaughter and said,
"Oh, my granddaughter, you've done so well to bring me this man,
but this is not for you.
Go back to your lodge, have some food, play with your friends,
and I will talk to this man."
The granddaughter left.
[Wukashni] looked to the man who walked up to her once again
and said, "I have this knife."
And she said, "Yes, I know,
and I will take it from you, but not like this.
You will hold it just above my palms which I will place directly underneath,
and when you're ready to let it go,
when you're really, really ready to let it go,
let go."
The man held the knife just above her palms,
and then he started to shake,
and then he wept,
and then he howled like a wolf,
and then he wept some more,
and finally, he was able to let go of the knife.
But before the knife would touch her palm, it exploded into light (Shoo!)
and went everywhere.
This is what happens when we let things go.
They turn into light,
and they go everywhere.
(Shoo!)
(Applause)