THE FINAL DESTINATION
Our Unawareness
MT. Everest is the highest peak in the world. It is 29,028 feet or 8848 metres high. One of the first people to try to ascend this peak was a British man called Maurice Wilson. This was in 1934. But what he thought would be the climax of his life turned out to be an enormous anti-climax.
Maurice had been a soldier in the First World War. He was so keen on climbing the highest peak in the world that for this sake he gave up his successful family business He spent all his money on buying a secondhand aircraft, which he flew, over a distance of some 6000 miles, from England to India, and landed at Purnea, in Bihar. He did not get permission to fly further on, and so he sold it. After this, he set off on his journey to Mt. Everest through Darjeeling and Tibet. Finally, all that he had left with him was a small tent, some rice, a camera and a few other things. He began his ascent of the mountain, and managed to climb till a height of around 19000 feet. The 21st of April 1934 was to be his 36th birthday, and he hoped to celebrate that day atop Mt. Everest. A few days prior to that, he had written in his diary:
Only 13,000 feet more to go. I have the distinct feeling that I’ll reach the summit on April 21.
But shortly after writing these lines with such evident confidence, a fierce Himalayan storm broke out. The severe weather conditions put an end to his plans of going further up the mountain, and he was compelled to go down. And so, he descended to a lower level. But after this, it was not in his fate to be able to move up the mountain again. No one really knows what happened to him then, but a year later, when Tenzing Norgay was heading up Mt. Everest, he found Maurice Wilson’s corpse, and, with it, his diary, the last entry in which was the sentence quoted above.
Maurice had planned to take a picture of himself atop Mt. Everest with his camera. His camera, he had hoped, would capture his moment of victory. But his time came before that could happen.
There was no Maurice Wilson left whose victory his camera could show to the world! This, in a sense, is the same story of all of us. Everyone thinks that he is advancing towards the peak of success, whereas the reality is just the opposite. In actual fact, everyone is heading towards a destination where there will be no one to welcome him other than Death.
People are all advancing in the direction of the unknown ‘tomorrow’, and yet they think that they are building a ‘successful’ world in the known ‘today’.
In this world, some people nurse the desire only for worldly success, but they have not even set off on the journey to their dream-world when Death grabs them. Others manage to attain, to greater or lesser extent, the objects of their desire. Yet, this does not give them the happiness they were looking for, and so they are no different from the first category of people. After getting what they hankered after, they realize that these things do not give them true joy. And so, in this world those who obtain the objects of their worldly desire feel as deprived as those who do not. Yet, few people realize this.
Human beings deprive themselves of what is truly worth having, and delude themselves into imagining that the things of this world will give them joy. Life is absolutely uncertain, yet people imagine it to be absolutely certain. People are all advancing in the direction of the unknown ‘tomorrow’, and yet they think that they are building a ‘successful’ world in the known ‘today’.
How unaware people are who think they know themselves! What failures those people are who consider themselves to be the most successful of all!