Planter
Banned
now for something more positive than the slayings, terrorists, rapes, and heinous crap we all have been hearing about lately.
next time things arent going well or you are just feeling down and bummed...read this.
This man is a true inspiration to others, even though that isnt his goal. His goal is for others to find their purpose.
http://www.si.com/partner/hyundai/108745?prx_t=Td0BAAAAAAEroLA&sr_source=lift_facebook
next time things arent going well or you are just feeling down and bummed...read this.
This man is a true inspiration to others, even though that isnt his goal. His goal is for others to find their purpose.
http://www.si.com/partner/hyundai/108745?prx_t=Td0BAAAAAAEroLA&sr_source=lift_facebook
Agents of Change. The pioneers. The explorers. Those who push the limits. Who refuse to back down. Who help others realize their own potential. We celebrate those stories. We celebrate Erik Weihenmayer.
Since he was young, Erik Weihenmayer knew that by the time he was a teenager he’d be blind from juvenile retinoschisis. What he didn’t know was, decades later, he'd not only have a family and a fulfilling job, but he'd be the first blind person to climb the Seven Summits—and stand atop Mount Everest.
In those early days of blindness, Weihenmayer remembers sitting alone in the school cafeteria and confronting a primitive vulnerability. Besides the day-to-day struggle of adapting, his biggest fear was that he would live a life without meaning or purpose. “You feel like a raccoon that’s just been cornered,” he recalls. “You don’t know anything about your potential. You don’t know how to break through the brick walls.”
Shortly after losing his sight, Weihenmayer joined up with a recreational program for the blind in Massachusetts. The group embarked on different adventures like tandem bike riding and canoeing. One weekend they went rock climbing and he immediately took to the tactile and problem-solving challenge of trying to make his way up the face. As his hands and feet became his eyes, he experienced the world through touch, sound and intuition. Learning how to climb revived a sense of purpose that would eventually take him around the world as an adventurer, athlete, and activist helping others find ways to live their own lives of meaning.
As a kid, Weihenmayer had read in Braille about Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, but it wasn’t until he was in his late 20s and an accomplished climber that he began to seriously consider tackling Mount Everest. There were plenty of doubts—both his own and others—about whether the overwhelming challenges of the climb were too great for someone who couldn’t see. “I was on the Summit track,” he says. “I thought maybe I would just do six out of the seven. Maybe this was too far out of my reach.”
A turning point came when Pasquale Scaturro, who had led other successful expeditions up Everest, approached Weihenmayer about putting together a team to help him climb the mountain. “A lot of times, opportunity comes from meeting the right people who believe in you and want to help you,” he says. “It’s also about who you choose to believe.”
As with many of Weihenmayer’s accomplishments, which include kayaking the Grand Canyon and completing the eight-day adventure race Primal Quest, climbing Mount Everest was as much a journey of the mind as it was the body. “Each day the mountain beats you down and you think, ‘I can’t do this if it gets any harder,’ and yet you know, of course, that it’s going to get much harder,” he remembers. “You have to discipline your mind so that as you move forward, moment by moment, you are not catastrophizing or checking out mentally because that can mean your last step. The fear is always present, but I try to channel it into focus and awareness. That only happens through lots of practice. You never know you’re going to reach the top until you do.”
But as the Sherpas say, even when you reach the top you’re really only halfway there. You still need to make it down safely, which is when most accidents happen because climbers tend to be less vigilant. The true summit, Weihenmayer says, is when you’re able to take the lessons you learned from the mountain and apply them to your life and share them with your family and community.
For Weihenmayer, the biggest lesson learned from climbing Mount Everest was what can be accomplished with a great team. “We had a lot of critics say that I’d cause a huge disaster up on the mountain,” he says. “Instead, 19 out of 21 of our climbers reached the top.”
In 2005, Weihenmayer co-founded the organization No Barriers to help share this lesson. Inspired by a climb he took with Mark Wellmen—the first paraplegic to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park—and Hugh Herr—an engineer and double-leg amputee who built his own bionic limbs—he wondered how the three of them, who’d all accomplished a great deal despite adversity, could come together and help others push past their barriers. A decade later, the organization is leading transformative expeditions and adventures around the world with veterans, youth and people with mental and physical challenges.
Weihenmayer is currently working on his third book, which explores the No Barriers message of “What’s within us is stronger than what’s in our way,” and examines the life lessons and people who have taught him how to keep moving forward. “People think I’m an anomaly, that ‘inspirational blind guy,’ but I’m just a normal person,” he says. “To separate yourself from me is to separate yourself from your own obligation to live a life of purpose. I want to help people discover how to do that, to find the light within themselves.”
Learn more about No Barriers and take a pledge to face your own challenge at http://getinvolved.nobarriersusa.org/pledge
