Some people climb their Mount Everest indoors, in their jobs, in their relationships or even in their health. Others head outdoors and pit themselves against nature at its most unforgiving. In raging rapids, spine-chillingly steep summits, uncharted ocean beds and even gravity-defying free falls from dizzying heights. India’s 105 km long Chader Trek on the frozen Zanskar river at -25 degrees in the Himalayan ranges of Ladakh has attracted nature tourists from all over the world, for decades. Rafting on the violently turbulent rapids in River Tons in Uttarakhand, mountain biking down the sheer canyons from Pang to Rhumste in Ladakh and many other adrenaline-popping journeys like these are the legacy left behind by naturalists like Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay and George Mallory, who showed the world how human willpower could tower above the highest peak in the world.

What is it about challenging nature that humans are drawn to?  What makes us risk our lives and set off on missions that test every breath, muscle and sinew in our bodies and jumpstart our minds? A succinct answer from Major HPS Ahluwalia, a member of the Mount Everest expedition in 1965, describes it best. “We do it to scale the summit within.” In the fast-paced world of technology, business and incessant media, everything and everyone around us is either a challenge or a competitor. Targets and deadlines are what drive us, and we evaluate ourselves and others on the basis of cold hard numbers. We chase numbers obsessively, so fixated on the world outside that we end up losing touch with what’s happening inside us. We lose awareness of ourselves, of who we really are and what makes us happy. It’s no longer about work-life balance because even our loved ones can’t seem to bring us the joy that we so urgently need. We begin to feel helpless, unable to tune out and switch off from the outside noise, not knowing how to navigate what we’re feeling. In other words, we are lost.

Nature is definitively the best compass known to man. Or beast. While our four-legged friends know this instinctively, human memory tends to get blunted by the chaos of life. But it comes back to us slowly, and some of us plug into nature when we’ve reached a dead-end, while others who want to push their own boundaries on journeys of self-discovery, do it preemptively. Nature offers us an instant sense of connection, a sort of cosmic GPS. The minute we plug in, nature zooms us out of our constructed realities, gives us a glimpse of the big timeless picture, and nudges us out of our existential flux. But not before forcing our attention to the present, pushing us to get out of our own heads and experience what is immediately around us. It teaches the magic mantra of mindfulness, sometimes by ensuring that our very survival in the wild depends on this. It forces us to recalibrate our own limits, to push boundaries that have been set for us and not by us.

Mountaineers Messener and Habeler were the first to successfully summit Mount Everest without oxygen tanks. Not only did they set a new record, but they also changed the rules. They gave the world a glimpse into what the human body and mind were capable of withstanding in extremely challenging environments. Nature helps us discover who we are as individuals and as a species and pushes us to reach our fullest potential.

It helps us reframe our lives and the issues that have been sniping away at us, giving us a certain fluidity of perspective. Apart from being the most precise life compass, nature is also the most immersive sensory stimulus that humans can hope to experience. It forces awake all senses -sight, smell, sound, touch and observation, and engages them in experiencing the moment. By fighting the challenges presented by the mountains, rivers, volcanos, oceans and such, nature forces us to expend all our negative energy that would otherwise have been passed on to someone else, somewhere else. We return back to our lives renewed, energized, rebooted, and recalibrated. With the realization that we are indeed bigger and mightier than we thought we were. The journey of self-journey has begun. The search for our best selves, the quintessential adventure called life.