Awakening

Today, in some feeble attempt to connect with Lincoln Hall--a mountaineer who almost lost his life on Everest--I tried to fathom the epitome of a meditative state. While attempting to summit Everest in 2006, Hall was left for dead, but miraculously made it off of the mountain while being coerced by Sherpas who were not his own (although the latter is only heresay). What saved his life was his ability to detach via Buddhist practice; desire, it is believed, is the root of unhappiness. Hall, while in and out of consciousness, hallucinated while simultaneously envisioning his family. Now, this may seem simple, something you and I may have done numerous times to deal with pain; however, Hall's experience was much different, in that, his body physically--not just emotionally--responded to this form of Yoga. As he imagined the nearness of his loved ones, his body temperature began to rise. He began to thaw.

I began to think of all of the trials with which I have been confronted throughout my life. I thought of how easily that pang of bitterness had, at times, consumed me; how easily anger and pity and cynicism had meandered in and out of my life. Then I placed myself on the Hillary Step, meters away from Everest's summit. I was cold and frostbitten so that my extremities were black with gangrene. My oxygen was depleted and fellow mountaineers, guides, and sherpas walked by ignoring my existence, because really, I did not exist. I was, at that moment, frozen in time. I was Lincoln Hall, except unlike Hall, my soul had been annihilated. Bitterness, anger, pity, and cynicism were symbolic of all of those empty canisters of oxygen that litter Everest. I was empty.

Then, something quite foreign happened. Those ghosts, what some have brushed off as being mere hallucinations, became real. Not in the literal sense, but rather an ephemeral happening. It was then that I had an epiphany. We are all on the brink of death; perhaps not today or next week or even next year, but it is inevitable. The ghosts and the people that Hall saw as he sat literally frozen to the mountainside, were not meant to be physical beings; these were the persona of survival at its greatest. A survival that encapsulates, not only what a passerby might see, but the core of mankind.

Regardless of your religious philosophy, it is the fight of achieving the here and now that really matters. When I was a small child, my great-great aunt had a plaque that hung on her wall that read: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. I would like to believe that those words were among the many visions Hall had the day he descended the grandest mountain in the world.