After the Peak

An excerpt from the book What’s Within You: Your Roadmap to Living Life With No Barriers by Tom Lillig & David Shurna

- Erik Weihenmayer

The day after Erik Weihenmayer climbed down from that snowy, windblown mountaintop on Everest, he was confronted by a new kind of storm—the whirlwind of fame. After years of climbing under the radar, suddenly Erik’s face was on billboards, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, he was interviewed on Oprah. His seemingly impossible feat would be documented in the film Farther than the Eye Can See as well as a TV movie, Touch the Top. Erik’s story was powerful and inspiring, and people wanted to hear it.

To the outside world, Erik had achieved it all. And yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. As Pasquale’s words echoed in his head —“Don’t make Everest the greatest thing you ever do”—Erik realized the deeper meaning that his friend was trying to relay: “I didn’t want my life to be a conquest. Goals feel like false summits; you reach what you thought was the top, only to discover a higher summit. So, you continue to climb higher and higher, always finding another summit a little higher, and you never find what you’re looking for. The magic of life has to exist beyond a perpetual series of summits.”

As Erik was contemplating what was missing from his life, he thought back to a time when he still had just a tiny bit of his sight remaining in his right eye—a time when, if he pressed his face against the screen, he could still watch television. In those waning days just before he went blind completely, he saw a news program that was focused on a young man named Terry Fox. Terry was a Canadian who had lost one of his legs to cancer, and he was in the hospital when he decided he was going to run across Canada in order to raise awareness for the disease.