This weekend, I watched a documentary called, Blindsighted. It shows how Erik Weihenmayer was the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. A few years later, he then leads six Tibetan blind teenagers to climb the 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri on the north side of Mount Everest.
Besides being an amazing story, two things stood out for me. The first was that Tibetans think that if you are blind in this life, you must have done something really bad in a past life. This obviously makes life even more difficult for blind children in Tibet.
Towards the end of the movie, the leaders are trying to decide whether to take the 3 remaining children up to the summit. Erik says that before Westerners got to Mount Everest (like Sir Edmund Hilary in 1953), Tibetans never even wanted to go to the top of the mountain. This idea of “getting to the top” is really a western idea. I wonder why do we always want to go to the top? It is not necessarily the same as being good at what you do or the best. Is it about being on the top looking down on others? What is it about for you?
