Blindsight

Today I went to one of the films on for the Wellington Film Festival called ‘Blindsight’. It was a documentary about a blind American guy who took 6 blind Tibetan youth on an expedition to climb the peak next to Mt Everest. This guy, Erik, lost his sight when he was 15 and yet went on himself to climb Mt Everest in 2001. He came in contact with a blind German woman who had journeyed alone to Tibet and started up a school for the blind there in Lahasa. In Tibet, they believe that people are blind because they did something wrong in a past life and are being punished for it. So blind children are outcasts, viewed as sinners – in one disturbing scene, two blind children are pushed while walking down the street by an old woman who tells them they deserve to eat their father’s corpse. So this German woman opens a school for the blind and takes these kids in and tries to instill in them the idea that they can achieve things in life and are just as worthy as sighted people.

As the film tells its story of the expedition being put together, it interweaves snippets of the everyday life of these children and their families. It is heart wrenching to see and hear the matter-of-factness with which the families talk of the disappointment and disgrace of having a blind child. One mother says of her son, ‘he was a clever child. But now look at him’, while he sits beside her with who-knows-what running through his head, his expression indiscernible.

Cue the American heroes to save the day, to give these kids the American dream – that anyone can do anything they put their mind to. Erik and his trusty band of Western guides prepare 6 blind kids, as well as the German lady and her partner, and they all set off on this awe-inspiring expedition to climb the peak just a step down from Mt Everest.

Of course, if this was some big budget movie or even a best-selling book, they would all have made it to the peak and screamed from the summit of their heroism in overcoming blindness and adversity and reaching the ultimate goal. The really meaningful thing about this story is that they didn’t. They made it to Advanced Base Camp, which is still an altitude over 21,000 feet. A couple of the kids were getting altitude sickness, and they were sent down. The Americans wanted to push on, to take the rest of the team to the summit, to achieve their goal. But the German woman said, wait a second, what are we doing this for? Are we doing this for the kids, or because we somehow want to prove something? On the way up she said the kids didn’t enjoy just climbing, climbing, climbing – they wished they could stop and sense and feel things and sing songs and tell stories. And at this point, when half of the children had gone back down, she felt that reaching the summit hadn’t been the point for her. To her the point of the expedition had been to teach the kids about solidarity and taking care of the weakest link in a team and caring for each other. And so they all turned back and went down.

That was what really hit home to me. They all had a goal – but along the way they had reassessed what that goal actually was and what was really important. Getting to the top of the mountain would have sounded good and made a good movie – but in the end it wasn’t the right choice. The Americans would have pushed on regardless, just to get to the top of the mountain, to be able to say they had done it, to look good, to not risk being perceived as a failure. But that wasn’t the right choice for that team at that time, and in the end they were all better off for having turned back.

And the kids still did get that sense of self-worth that the whole trip was meant to be about. For them it was never about getting to some arbitrary peak. For them the excitement was in knowing that this team of people believed in them as capable human beings, believed they were capable of anything they set their mind to. And they carried that with them afterwards, and began to dream of the lives they were capable of having.

And it made me think – what are our mountains? What are the peaks that we want to be able to say we have scaled – and in the end, are they really what is important? Maybe we all have a summit we want to be able to say we have climbed – and maybe if we become too focused on it as our goal, we miss the really important stuff along the way. Maybe sometimes it’s ok to stop and go back. Maybe forsaking the important things in life to reach some arbitrary goal is the real failure – maybe success is knowing your motivations, and knowing when to let some goals go.

Maybe we’re all just climbing blind. And if so, you better be sure you’re enjoying the climb, because the peak is just another bit of dirt under your feet and a dream of what might be in front of you.