c u on top - satyabrata dam

Any climber, however intrepid, insane and outrageous he or she may be who says has never felt fear of death is bullshitting. On return while laying our aching limbs next to a lumbering fire with a pint in our hand we may be pouring out boisterous songs and ‘devil-may-care’ attitude, but mark my words friends, up there when the elements were trying their best to nip our lives, we had forgotten all our cockiness and had only a silent prayer on your lips and thought only of surviving through the day and through the moment. It’s not so much as the fear of death as the familiar world of the living that we don’t wish to give up yet. Do we ever actually fail or it is the pre-eminence of a failure that puts us in a quandary! Why is it that we can walk comfortably on a thin line of 6 inch in width on ground, without ever stepping out of it, whereas put a similar sized and equally sturdy plank 10 ft above ground and we would perhaps not find it that easy. Take that plank 100 ft up and perhaps on...

Attempt must be made even when failure is certain, for nothing in this world can be predicted with absolute certainty; except perhaps the will and struggle to stay alive - since this will certainly conclude in a failure, if staying alive was what you really were attempting. So don't struggle or attempt to stay alive, you will fail. Rather be alive and you will never fail.

Should we be scared to fail? What is that we are scared of about failing? And before that we must understand when do we really fail? How do you define failure? Is it objective or subjective? Many questions and there are zillions of documents and research data on this quest. Psychologists make mega-bucks trying to cheer people who conceive themselves as failures. What if these people are not really ‘failures’! They could as well be achievers on a different scale. From a rock climber’s point of view; failure on 5.9 could be a success on 5.8 or 5.7 and in my climbing world reaching the summit is not always the sole criteria for success. Even when we don’t reach the summit it could be a success; as I am wont to say that no matter where you reach, it is still a summit, ‘your’ summit. Failure can and does evoke different emotions within different individuals, at different times under differing circumstances. I could feel disappointed or more encouraged; it could lead to my giving up or redou...