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Mount Everest is a place where I think I found
the most portals to discovery for myself, personally.
Everest has been in the news quite a bit recently
chiefly because of a huge, devastating avalanche
that took place last April
where a number of Nepalese climbers
predominantly from the Sherpa ethnic group
were killed in the support of Western mountaineers.
Of course mountaineering is
certainly by some people's view
almost an indulgent type of a sport.
We're not going to save anyone's life doing it.
We might actually by not doing it save our own lives.
But where we find ourselves
and certainly what climbers share,
I mean, amongst a variety of different things,
perhaps a deficient sense of hygiene amongst others.
But we have this great sense of wanting to
impose ourselves or place ourselves
in a humble way
inside this incredible, dynamic,
ever-changing present environment.
Now certainly we try to overcome this environment,
we try to work with this environment.
As athletes we certainly have
great technical skills, the ability to climb rock,
snow and ice.
But we also learn technological skills
and psychological skills to match that.
Of course the motivation for this
is something that has been studied certainly since
the time Everest was first discovered
and even long before that.
What motivates climbers to keep going to that place?
And ultimately we find ourselves
navigating our lives
through this sense of
eternity coupled with impermanence.
And this is part of certainly my Buddhist training,
that we essentially are all going to
have a death of this life.
We're not going to know
where we're going to move through into the next one.
How do we navigate this
on this great path of self-actualization?
And certainly people like the early explorers
going to Mount Everest in the 1950s.
George Mallory for one,
he would've taken this picture back in the early 1920s.
When they first actually reached the mountain.
Of course many people know that Mallory was a person who
uttered this great
four-word phrase
that is derivative of all human motivation to climb Everest.
We go to climb because it's...
because it is there.
Little bit cryptic, don't you think?
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I mean, certainly it's there, it's the highest point on Earth,
once, you know, the cartographers and
geologists discovered that.
But Mallory would also write later,
"you must understand that there is something in all of us
that responds to the challenge of this mountain
and goes out to meet it.
That the struggle is the struggle of life itself,
upwards and forever upwards.
And, that's the reason why we go.
For what we take from this adventure
is nothing but sheer joy.
And joy is, after all, the object of life.
We don't live simply to eat and make money.
We eat and make money so we can enjoy life.
That is what life means
and what life is for."
And you have to understand that George Mallory's generation
was nearly decimated in World War One.
Many of the climbers who went on this,
these first three forays to Everest
were all part of the military,
had lost friends, had lost family,
had lost so many different parts of their lives.
Many of them, many people actually saw
the Mount Everest expeditions
as a way to reintegrate themselves
into their real lives, to their passionate lives
to the ones they had before the war.
And by going out into this challenging natural environment
that they could do this, that they could succeed.
It's a very romantic type of a notion that is
one that Mallory wrote extensively about.
Of course my time on Everest was a bit later than Mallory's.
I started climbing in 1985.
I had to fail four times
before I was able to summit and then
the next seven times were quite a bit easier
as a result.
But for me personally,
climbing has always been a tool for self-actualization,
it's been a way that I challenge myself
day in and day out.
There's always a way that I can improve,
there's always a way that I can rigorously analyze my approach,
there's always a way I can find
greater, more collaborative team members.
The mountain is always different.
The environment is always changing.
It's a dynamic environment.
Many of the challenges are the same, obviously.
But, you know, like Heraclitus said,
"you never dip your foot into river twice."
It's always different, it's consistently changing.
So this type of environment is one that requires
a very rigorous approach
and constant evaluation of it.
Of course for me being on Everest,
learning about the local cultures,
especially the Sherpa.
People who have lived in this region for upwards of 400 years.
But we climb with the Sherpa
and we learn that their motivations
are very different from ours.
They don't have a shred of romance.
They are in some ways fearful of this place.
They are also concerned about
not propitiating the spirits
by trying to climb to the rooftop of the world.
At least some of the early
Sherpa involvement on Everest
certainly back in the 1920s and even in
the 1950s, when Sir Edmund Hillary went to climb with Tenzing,
there was still this sense of fearfulness
in many of them that they might somehow be
violating or some way insulting
these local gods and spirits.
But in recent years Sherpas have
with their burgeoning skills and their craft on Everest,
they've also taken on
greater risk because the pay is good.
And I know that many of them have real conflicts
because they're also Buddhist
and they realize that
to actually become
and to find an incarnation as a human being
means that you've led a very virtuous life.
You've been really blessed
with this great human form.
His Holiness Dalai Lama said,
"the likelihood of you arriving in human form
is like rising out of the Pacific Ocean
with your hand through
the donut of a life preserver."
Just with a random rising through the ocean.
So, why do you want to take on that excessive risk?
Why do you want to threaten
that human life on your great path of self-actualization?
Shouldn't you be doing something like these monks
who are working towards the betterment
of their own communities?
I've not only been a mountaineer on Everest.
I've had the benefit to go into the Kingdom of Mustang
and to do archaeological research
that was featured in the Sky Caves article couple of years back.
It's been a great opportunity for my family.
You can see my wife here who's a filmmaker,
who's a big part of the team
and my daughter Cleo is doing sound recording
on the back there.
And we do some work with literacy,
not only in the Everest region but also in Mustang.
We've tried early on to instill in our kids
this great sense of service.
And to try and to get to know and understand
the local populations.
You know, a lot of people have described climbers
and climbing itself as being
one of the most celebrated compulsive obsessive disorders
that's out there.
You know, I think throw in a little bit of narcissism
and then the bad hygiene,
you kinda get a pretty good idea
of what most climbers are like.
But we try to get up into these wild places,
some of which we have to climb very difficult rock,
mostly because it has little integrity.
It's almost like mud.
So we have to work with very primitive tools
and find our way into these caves,
that sometimes are on cliffs
that are thousands of feet high.
Of course we come out of these caves having worked in the dust,
having worked in the mud
and we definitely look like we've been put through the wringer a bit.
And so, when that happens I have to call in my son Finn,
and I really send him in as well.
This is a real family type of a project
and we look at our teammates
as real family members as well.
See my daughter here,
she's with Dr. Mark Aldenderfer.
They were unraveling one of these
remarkable gold and silver
annealed masks
that we found in one of our caves
in a village known as Samdzong
which is right up against the Tibetan border
in the Kali Gandaki region of the Central Himalaya of Nepal.
Jacqueline Eng, she's not doing a tantric ritual there.
She's actually a bioarchaeologist
and she's studying some of the bones to try to get an idea
of what type of lives these people led.
She looks at bones almost like a book.
And she can figure out by the condition of the bones
and the type of markings on them
what the life and health of that--
of that individual was actually like.
Dr. Christina Warinner who does
some of the work respective to our--
our genetic extraction from teeth,
who's working right now on
trying to put together
a genetic genotype that gives us an idea
of where these people are from.
And we can have, I think a better understanding
of where the origins
of the original people inhabiting these places are.
And we've been able to help rewrite some of the history
of the peopling of the Himalaya
and migration through those incredible mountains.
So, just to give you an idea
we are frequently
suspending ourselves from ropes, climbing up
some of these remarkable
mud-encrusted, completely unstable cliffs
using pneumatic hammer drills,
using rebar anchors
because the material is just so difficult to bind
and so difficult to anchor in.
And it's not infrequent that we're actually taking
extreme risk getting up into these places
to try to push back
on our ignorance, to try to push back
on this yearning for knowledge.
And ultimately for me personally
that's where it all is. It's about self-actualization
and it's about acquiring wisdom.
It's also about inspiring the next generation,
it's about inspiring my own children.
And certainly as a parent,
as a husband, as a son,
I worry consistently
about having my kids in an environment that,
you know, obviously could be very threatening.
By the same token, as a parent
I don't want to insulate them so much
that they never get off the Xbox or the iPad.
And I think you parents know what I'm talking about here.
So, in any case, I think
it's really well summarized in a quote
by one of my favorite climbers.
His name is Edward Whymper and in 1865
he was one of the first people to climb
the Matterhorn for the first time.
And he said, "Climb if you will,
but remember that strength and courage
are not without prudence.
And that a moment's negligence
can lead to the dissolution of happiness
in a lifetime.
Take care with each step
and do nothing in haste.
And from the beginning
think what may be in the end."
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