Postcards

The last two weeks, I have been reading a book called Dead Lucky, by Lincoln Hall, who was left for dead on Mt. Everest in 2006, and yet was found alive the following morning.

The writing is sometimes beautiful and sometimes so-so. But the story is compelling. It makes me want to stand on the summit of Everest…though not to climb it. And there are moments of deep profundity, like this, from the epilogue:

 There are so many stimuli thrown at us through our lives and so many roads of perception down which we could travel. If we indulged ourselves in all of them, we would go mad, but instead most of us go to the other extreme and numb ourselves by developing habitual responses that allow us to slip into autopilot mode. We go to foreign countries but see everything in the form of postcards.

                        —Lincoln Hall, Dead Lucky, p. 274