"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."
~ Edmund Hillary

It isn't as if I have always wondered about this. The thought has just come screaming in today. On the face of it, nothing has sparked it off, much like the deceptive placid views of the high snows as seen in postcards. Where people from the plains, confuse a ferociously blowing snow plume as a cloud flirting with the peak. We climbers know better. It clearly is a warning to us to not push our luck too far. Yet, in a silently strange and subtle sense, something has sparked off these thoughts today.

Why is it that a climbing or trekking trip of just a few days, alters so many things when one returns to the plains? Why is it that a few days in the heights alters the very direction of life? Why is it that the psychological gear shift happens so abruptly after a short tryst with the snows? Why do some close friends vanish after one returns? Why do some new ones appear almost literally rising from the dead, as it were? Why do pictures of the trip paint a strange melancholy? Why does play with the memory of distant drumming sounds of glaciers and rivers, space out the faculties like nothing else on earth? Why do material words sound so empty? And why do dear ones sound so distant?