Learnings

By Zerin Anzum Karim

I signed up for the EBC trek because I wanted to do something that would have a positive meaningful impact on myself and others. This experience did exactly that by enabling me to notice and understand the different aspects of my personal behaviour and thought patterns that were formed through the trauma from earlier in my life. 

The trek challenged and tested me in a number of ways but mainly, by putting myself out of my comfort zone, making me learn to focus on the present. During this journey, even though you are not physically alone out there, it is an incredibly lonely experience. It forces you to look inside yourself and be in the presence of nothing but your own heartbeat, face the the facets of yourself that you may have been otherwise unwilling to address. 

It has also taught me that, your destination may be different to those with whom you share your journey, and that is alright. The holes you have within yourself will not be filled by trekking a mountain, you will find them right where they were when you climb down unless you face them at ground zero. It is ok to be vulnerable, it is ok to fail, it is ok not to be who other people want you to be. The mountains do not need you to prove anything, and are merely there to help you see the desperation of your innate need to prove yourself to fight your own existential insecurities. 

Trekking up the mountains for more than a week only to be walking back from the last leg of the journey was one of the hardest things I have had to accept in my life. Surrendering my ego and allowing myself to fail was an incredibly painful experience but at the same time, one that let me be a human. My biggest realisation during this trek was that, in the years that I have been reaching out to nature prior to this specific trek, I did not think I was goal driven or that I was constantly in a fight to prove myself. It was always more of a free wander that did not have to fit in a box or did not have a set goal in the end. So for me, the EBC trek for me really revealed that fight because it was a wander with a goal, so my inner ego inevitably got caught at the intersection.

Wasfia mentions in her National Geographic short, “ When I look at a girl, the first thing I see is hope and power within herself to choose her own destiny. Decide who she wants to be. She doesn’t have to be a mountaineer; whatever mountain is in her life, empower her to climb it.” I believe my biggest realisation fro this journey ties in with this quote of hers very closely in that, the EBC was not the mountain I had to climb, it was the self realisations that came out of this journey that would help me to climb the mountain that is my life, overcoming hardships with my identity and the inherited wrongful need for external recognition.

I am hopeful that learning about my experience in the outdoors and of the many others’ that are out there, will help girls in Osel to know that there is an alternative medium of expression for the crucial conversations of self healing and discovery of one’s untainted purpose. Needless to say, the work that Wasfia intends to do through Ösel in support of alternative education for young girls at scale is crucial in the making of a stronger inclusive workforce as we all need to be better at being humans first and have higher emotional quotient, to be able to thrive alongside the intelligent emerging technologies which will be an integral part of our workplace in the near future.