I imagined many months ago that when the Everest Rugby Challenge was all over I would feel a great emptiness. I was not wrong.
It is difficult to explain how an expedition like this can so utterly fill every waking moment of your life. The camaraderie, the laughter, the arguments and the tears that are a part of everyday life and permeate your very existence. It completes my soul in ways that are difficult to explain and I have more than once struggled to articulate my feelings adequately. Even writing this is itself overwhelming and strangely I find myself on the verge of tears.
I often fall over that verge if truth be told.
As we start our way home, despite the mental and physical struggles, my soul yearns to remain in the peace of the mountains but my heart tells me I must return to the World as I have been away too long from my loved ones. In being part of this challenge I have roused a spirit that I long since thought gone and I have rediscovered a wanderlust and yearning for sights unseen and experiences yet unexplored that I had forgotten had previously existed. This is both a curse and a blessing and, on occasion, leaves me feeling like two souls desperately at odds with each other pulling in two very different directions.
“I’d like to get away from earth awhile and then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me and half grant what I wish and snatch me away not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree and climb black branches up a snow-white trunk toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, but dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches”
Robert Frost
I know I will miss my fellow challengers, we shared a journey that shall not likely be repeated and in doing so genuinely achieved great things for a worthy cause. It is difficult to describe the bond you build with your companions in circumstances like these and as I struggled to explain it I remembered, in a flurry of public school pretentiousness, a passage from Henry V that just seemed apt:
“From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”
William Shakespeare – Henry V, Act IV Scene iii 58–62
For me it is always the little things that linger longest in the memory. My kit reviews with Robin Calloway that will probably never be deemed suitable for broadcast or publication, fleshlightgate that somehow managed to slip past the censors, my personal unspoken demons and the unconditional support of so many people.
My friends, family and supporters, who I suspect at times struggled to understand the meaning or purpose of this trip, I feel I owe you an explanation of why I went and to try and explain why I am the way I am. I do not have the words to put it better than this, my favourite poem, by Robert Frost:
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
Finally for those all those strangers who read these ramblings out of morbid fascination, genuine interest, idle curiosity or simply boredom I will leave you with this:
Be unexpected, be kind, be authentic and above all live your life without regrets. Speak for those who have no voice and where you are able help those who need it give aid without reserve, without condition and without regard for the often man made barriers or conventions that seek to control or divide. If you are privileged understand that it is also a duty of privilege to help those less fortunate than yourself. Not for reward but because if we all do our part the cold distant world becomes closer and warmer than before.
As a great man once told me: No what ifs, no if onlys and no regrets.
Deano's World 