While attending the Vancouver Bike Show this weekend, I wandered through the Outdoor Adventure and Travel Show which was being hosted right beside the Bike Show. I picked up all sorts of wonderful ideas for things to do this summer, and I met Mick.
Mick is from Quadra Island and runs a company called Wilderness Trekking. He sat at his table covered in books about the Himalayas. I stopped to chat and we talked about me wanting to go to Everest Base Camp. He asked me why I wanted to go to Base Camp. We chatted about big mountains and the experience of actually seeing it with your own eyes.
Mick has been going to the Himalayas for 23 years. He is 46 - so that's half his life. For half his life he has been recognised his passion, and embraced it.
At 45, I'm starting to make inquiries about going to the Himalayas. I read Into Thin Air many years ago, and then read every other book written about that event. Each year I follow the expeditions closely and wonder about the people who find their way to the big mountains.
For years I've thought, "one day I would like to go there, and see it for myself", but it was always in a "as if that would ever happen" kind of way. It's almost like it would be too grand an experience for ordinary people like me. Besides, it would be expensive, I'd have no one to go with, I'd be weird about group travel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The excuses were plenty.
This year I started to realise that at 45, one day is kinda now. So I've started to look into turning this ridiculously far out fantasy into a reality. Maybe it's not even that ridiculous. Maybe regular folk are allowed. It's going to be expensive - but in relation to the potential experience, it will be cheap. Going alone may be the right experience for me, as long as I find the right guiding company.
What's so different between Mick and I, that I feel like the Himalayas are too grand for me, and he keeps going back again and again because he loves it so much. Why do some of us wish and wonder, and others just go do it?
I don't know the answer, but I do know that I can make some choices. One of those choices is to stop making excuses and go do the things that keeping pulling at my heart.
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