Dead man walking in Shangri-la

For some time now I have been methodically cleaning up my lifestyle as my body has become less forgiving of abuse and more demanding of consideration. There were clear warning signs popping up all over the place: age-spots (free radical damage) on my forehead, bouts of sciatica, tendonitis, fibrositis and other inflammatory markers of a weakening, stressed-out infrastructure; shitty vision, a flabby gut, the short-term memory of a goldfish and a rising disposition towards diabetes.

Sometimes you just don’t want to look in the mirror …

I think the turning point came when I decided to celebrate my 50th year on Planet Earth hiking in the Himalayas. We went to Zanskar in the Ladakh region of northern India, high on the Tibetan plateau, a valley steeped in clear Buddhist light, just the right space to reflect on five decades of (sometimes) sentient being.

Three days of hiking later, reeling from altitude sickness, diarrhoea and a crippling sciatica attack, I finally staggered over a relatively insignificant 4 500m peak and peered down into a Shangri-la valley carpeted with golden sheaths of wheat bisected by roaring snow-melt rivers, a landscape dotted with voluptuous stupas and giant mani walls of stone-carved prayer. Christ, I had barely made it.

Earlier that day one of our party had died on the mountain – mainly, I believe, of stupidity. A chain-smoking asthmatic with an all-to-obvious coronary problem stumbling along precipitous paths, he had death written all over his sweaty brow. (I recall secretly relishing his late joining of our group; shit, he made me look like Usain Bolt). Drawing on a neo-Marxist philosophy course in the Seventies I concluded gravely that his death was, well, over-determined.

The dead guy was the brother of one of our guides whom, we discovered later, had broken a cardinal rule of acclimatisation by rushing us up the mountain too fast. Did the guide kill his own brother? I thought so. I wouldn’t have let the poor bugger climb a jungle gym.

So obvious was his incapacity, so inevitable was his demise that for some time afterwards I couldn’t help wondering whether our group had been used as ignorant props in some bizarre assisted suicide/life insurance scam. OK, not as bizarre as Brett Kebble’s, but pretty weird anyway.

If I sound callous now, that’s exactly how I felt then – mightily pissed off that someone could so selfishly unleash such heavy karma over this extraordinary place – and over me (up in smoke went my fitful meditations on compassion). And it cast a cloud of deepening gloom over my own piss-poor effort to rise to the challenge of the Himalayas; Fifty is IMHO far too young to waver. And boy had I wavered. I had wobbled; I had stumbled, tumbled and barely gotten back up.

Since then I have tried a little harder to be a little healthier, a little fitter, a little stronger, a little less like that stuttering, heaving ruin dragging his/my sorry arse halfway up the Himalayas.

Postscript: Several days into the Zanskar hike we arrived one glorious morning at a small stone tea-house. Entering the cool, dim room, we sat on a hand-hewn bench, stretching out tired legs. As my eyes adjusted to the darkened space, my attention was drawn to a poster on the wall. It was stained, frayed, faded … but it revealed a magnificent truth. Like the Buddha himself, frozen in pure intensity, was Jonty Rhodes sweeping gracefully before the wicket. In India the love of cricket seeps into the deepest cracks …