Laura
Thanks for your beautiful writing. I enjoyed and appreciated it.
This deserves not one but several quotes from the mountaineering literature. I tried to choose from your work vs play theme and the 'black balloon' birthday theme. The last one is rather sad, but don't let it happen. Keep going. Harvey
As obvious as it seems, it took me a long while to realize that what had happened to us was more important than what happened to the mountain.
David Roberts, Deborah page 8
So is mountaineering altogether a private affair between the man and his mountain.
HW Tilman, Everest 1938 page 435
I was a surgeon. The powerful aura of Mount Everest had been absorbed into my subconscious and I considered the summit unobtainable for me…surgery was what I did, not what I was. Gradually I felt the need for a long pause from what I did to see what I was and whether there was any difference between the two.
Kenneth Kamler, Doctor on Everest, page 23
Courage is doing only what you are scared of doing… it takes more endurance to work in a city than it does to climb a mountain.
Peter Boardman, The Shining Mountain page 12
But no journalist wrote about the banality of city life or how easy it is to become another automaton paying bills and working nine to five and being so removed from the primary necessities of life and so far from real fear and natural beauty and human instinct that when death finally approaches in some antiseptic white room, just as you have been waiting for it, you sense that you have already been dead for years.
Jonathan Waterman, In The Shadow of Denali page 246
