No one’s script in life is what we think it's going to be
Last week heard a talk at the BBC by Matt Dickinson, the film-maker/writer who climbed to the summit of Everest. He told of the personal and technical challenges - brought back memories of Joe Tasker. I didn’t know Joe that well, but worked with Tom, his father, regularly. Joe was killed on Everest in 1982. I remember it vividly on the 9 o’clock news and the phone call afterwards. Tom gave me some things from Joe’s trunk when it was sent back from China including a copy of his book ‘Savage Arena’ which had just been published.

I was struck by the relationship between the things we have control over and the things we don’t – the way Matt saw the freak killer storm – it was something unpredictable and yet they could be prepared for it, “people don’t die because of the storm on Everest, they die because they are not prepared” I'm not sure that is always true but I understand the challenge.



Here’s an outline of his story.
Matt Dickinson had no intention of climbing Mt. Everest. He just wanted to make a movie. The actor Matt was supposed to be filming turned back. Matt's movie was in shambles but his adventure was born. Matt was infected with summit fever.

He was unable to resist the urge to climb to the top of the world. What possessed Matt Dickinson? The need to finish his movie. All the carefully laid plans that looked so good in London came unstuck as he and his team worked their way up the arduous Tibetan side of Everest. The killer storm complicated things further . And as Matt had observed in other expeditions, people do change under stress, relationships get tense, and objectives get lost.

If there’s a moral to the story, Matt believes, it is that no one’s script in life is what we think it's going to be. Mt. Everest got to play a role in his -- the mountain, he found, has a way of exerting its own pressures and controls on people, of fostering an eerie relationship. But the relationship is not personal. What matters, he found, is the way we approach our own mountains. That also determines the outcome. http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/dickinson/