I recently completed the Everest Base Camp Trek. This trek takes you from an elevation of 2846m (9337ft) to 5346m (17539 ft) covering roughly 65 kms over 9 days. As intense as this trek is, it gives you ample time and potent triggers for reflection and introspection. Personally, I found this trek to be a bite sized microcosm of life in general and I have tried to capture these life lessons as seen from my different lenses – as an amateur trekker, an experienced leader, an executive coach and as a spiritual novice. These below are my top 5 in an ascending order:
5) Assess your personal situation, plan and prepare accordingly.
4) Have your goals but be flexible
3) It’s all about People
2) It is not a race. Show-up and be present
1) Surrender to the larger life force
Read along to understand my experiences and the associated lessons
5)Assess your personal situation, plan and prepare accordingly
For every decision we had to make about this trek, there was a plethora of choices, each with its pros and cons, associated reviews and advice (solicited and unsolicited). I would list the choice of the tour operator, insurance provider, personal training plan and choice of climbing gear as some of the areas where I found that the decision making is as individual and personalized as it gets.
I started preparing for this trek 4 months in advance incorporating weight loss, strength, endurance and stamina training. Even though I gave myself a 7/10 on my training goals, every bit of that training paid off during the trek.
Enroute, we met fellow trekkers with varying degrees of planning & preparation, and we observed their experiences. Medical evacuations were common, and we saw a few up close including the angst around the costs and insurance coverage. And then there were those who made a last-minute impulsive decision to do the trek and breezed through it without any issues. We saw trekkers struggling in La Sportivas and Scarpas while the sherpa porters breezed through with 50kgs on their backs wearing The North Face knock-off shoes.
Life Lesson:
In life we are faced with a similar plethora of choices for every major and minor decision of our lives, and we have to consider a whole range of factors before making that choice. It is natural to compare our situation to that of others or to draw from other’s experiences, but at the end of the day, we are responsible for our choices.
You could be the guy who chose not to take a medical evacuation insurance for $200 but ended up paying $1700 to be evacuated or get away without any need for evacuation hence saving $200. At end of the day it is your choice and you take responsibility for it. So make a choice that works for you and one that you can live with.
To prepare for any important goal in your life, as with this trek, making a realistic assessment of your situation and acknowledging the gap between where you are and where you want to be, is the starting point. This will help you come up with a realistic plan to get to your goal. The hard truth here though is that often we may not know the reality of our situation or worse may not be willing to accept it and instead choose to believe a perception, which in-turn leads to an incorrect or unrealistic path to the goal. Its ok to reach out to a professional who can help you assess the gap to the goal and help you work towards it.
4) Have your goals but be flexible
This is probably my first trip that had a weather contingency day built in. Its par for the course in any trip involving a flight between Kathmandu and Lukla. During the trip we heard many stories of trips cancelled due to weather related disruptions that lasted 2-3 days. Our trip too ran into weather disruptions to and from Lukla however we were fortunate to have a resourceful operator who had the connections and the foresight to shift us from a plane travel to a helicopter to minimize any disruptions (links back to choices discussed above). Despite that, we spent an average of 5 hours at the airport on both occasions with uncertainty on the way forward.
The other variable to the trip comes from Acute Mountain Sickness (aka Altitude Sickness or AMS). It’s a known fact that AMS can hit anyone at any time in the high-altitude environment that these treks operate in. Trips are built to accommodate acclimatization days and there are a whole bunch of medicines and home remedies to prevent AMS, but it still occurs. And when it does, the best option is to go down to a lower altitude which often requires a medical evacuation given the remoteness of these locations. It’s often a tough conversation between the tour leaders and affected trekker. There are too many emotions involved to accept the reality of not being able to reach your goal. And if you are friend/ partner of the affected trekker, you have the added the conundrum of continuing onwards or letting go off your goal to support your affected friend/ partner. These are real decisions that we saw trekkers grappling with enroute.
Life Lessons:
Such situations are not uncommon in life. Could be as simple as the unexpected traffic jam that delays you or the fantastic life altering opportunity that your partner gets which poses a question mark to your own career goals and ambitions. There is no easy or a one size fits all answer however getting angry, frustrated and upset is not going to help. Often, they key to finding an answer lies in understanding all the facts of the situation, understanding the bigger picture and being flexible enough to come up with a way forward.
3) It’s all about People
The Sherpa guides are critical part of the trek. They are these amazing people who very easily slip in and out of multiple roles – guide, trek leader, motivator, photographer and much more as needed. The core of this relationship is trust and something that needs to be built very quickly to ensure you have a good trek.
Your core group with whom you undertake this trip play critical role in your overall experience of the trip. I undertook this bucket-list trek with my best friend of over 30 years. From a larger friends’ group of 7, it was finally just the two of us who decided to go along for given the commitment needed to get in shape for the trek.
Enroute we met people from all walks of life and from different parts of the world. Personally, during the toughest part of the treks, an encouragement from a fellow trekker, a conversation with a passerby or just watching a much older person enjoying the trek provide that much needed boost to keep me going. Early in the trek, I injured my left knee muscle and was struggling. Thanks to my friend and some of the fellow trekkers, my knee was examined, any major injuries ruled out and I received guidance on the care I need to take to have a smooth trek going forward. The same trekkers kept checking in on me over the days and I could see the happiness in their eyes as they watched me trek alongside.
Life Lessons
The mountains are the great leveler. We are all equal in the mountains where your qualifications, positions, etc don’t matter. We each have our own journeys and the fun is in connecting with each other in simple non-judgemental manner, bereft of any labels. The energy I gained from the social interactions along the way powered me through the day. What would it take to do the same back in the real world? Collaborating in the mountains was so easy and effortless. How can that be replicated in the real world?
From a management & leadership perspective, this experience re-iterates the core ingredients for success – alignment on the goals, bringing together a team that trusts each other and believes in each other’s capabilities, clear strategy and aligned execution.
2) It is not a race. Show-up and be present
“Bistari Bistari” or slowly slowly is the one consistent message that you receive from everyone along the way. The mantra for success in high altitude trekking is to find and follow your own walking rhythm. There are no prizes for coming first. Completion is the prize. You are not a lesser person if someone older than you walk past, and neither are you the better one if you pass a younger person. Instead, if you pass someone or someone passes you, smile, engage and interact. This is what kept me going.
In an intense 9-day trek like this one, where you trek 7-9 hours as a daily average, you have your highs and lows. Nevertheless, every day you start the trek by showing up for breakfast at 6:30 am. And the only way to really enjoy the trek is by being present in the moment. During the trek, you pass beautiful vistas, paths filled with rhododendron trees in full bloom, changing landscapes, birds and butterflies going about their business at high altitudes, sudden snow flurries falling on your face and red cheeked kids playing along the trail and greeting you as you trudge along. You can choose to be present in the moment and enjoy these experiences or be lost in that niggling knee pain worrying about your trek over the next few days. The choice is obvious.
Life Lessons
Like the choice, the life lesson too is obvious. Whether we like it or not, most of us are in the rat race. Day-in and out in some part of our life or the other. Comparing ourselves to others, be it career progress, wealth accumulation or our own myriad definitions of success, and internally berating ourselves or gaining false pride. What we forget is our journey is unique to us in every little aspect of our life. No one knows our complete story better than us and similarly we do not know theirs. Our speed is determined by our situations and choices made by us and the same applies to others. Therefore, it is not a race. It never was, never will be. So, find your own life rhythm and follow it.
And yes, show-up and be present. Whether it is that 6:30 am gym appointment or that difficult meeting, show-up. Life will have its highs and lows but focusing on the pain and worrying about the future is not going solve anything. Instead, be present and enjoy the small joys and daily interactions with people. Watch the world go by, wait to smell the flowers, hear the birds chirp, and do the small daily things that make you happy in the moment.
1) Surrender
Anyone who has been in the Himalayas knows that “you don’t climb the mountains, the mountains allow you to pass”. We may think as highly as we may want about ourselves but all that vanishes when you are standing in the midst of the mighty Himalayas. In the presence of these massive mountains, It is easier to realize the meagerness of our existence in the vast universe and to surrender to the larger life force. The realization quickly dawns that the only thing truly in your control is to take the next step forward, one step at a time. Nature is in charge here and controls everything else. I found this realization to be both humbling and relieving at the same time. It made everything so much simpler and lighter allowing me to be more present along the way and to enjoy the trek every step of the way.
Life Lessons
“To be in a state of surrender” may seem like spiritual mumbo-jumbo or a defeatist approach to some but then daily life is not very different to life in the mountains. In daily life too, all we really control is our next step. In-fact one might argue that we don’t even control our next breath. One doesn’t really know what the next moment holds. To me “Surrender” is about accepting the presence of the larger life force. It is about letting go and not trying to force solutions on situations that I don’t control and instead having faith and trust that there is a larger life force taking care of things in its own way.