AS A boy, 14, I trekked to a place in India called Sandakphu at 3,636 metres and on a shivering morning, the clouds parted like a theatre curtain and there it was.
Mount Everest. White, high, far, forbidding. It looked like the point from where you leapt into god's arms, and I was in awe of those who had climbed it, even tried, even died on it. That awe still lives and it is reserved now for the women from Singapore who got there.
It takes courage to shrug off the comfortable life, to hear a call of some distant mountain, river or cave and to go explore the boundaries of the planet and the self.
Where would mankind be if we didn’t have explorers, wanderers, adventurers, how would we map the world, how dull would be our spirit?
If there were no dreamers, we might still think the world was flat. So what if this mountain has been climbed before: think of it as practice, a keeping alive of the spirit.
These women deserve wide celebration for many reasons. They answered this voice from the wild and within. They did not say it was too hard, too cold, too far. They did not let uninterested sponsors deny them.
They have something we don't. Spunk. In their 70s, when they rewind their lives for their grandchildren, imagine the stories they will have about chasing dreams.
Those who say what is the big deal to ascend a mountain so often summitted are probably those whose idea of adventure is to visit a different mall on Sunday. Inside our forests of concrete, we have become prisoners of the trivial and strangers to nature's beauty and challenges.
In modern times, the "great unknown" is no longer the vast plains and mountains but a restaurant we haven’t been to.
When Khoo Swee Chiow, twice a climber of Everest, speaks of a sunny day and clean blue sky at 8,000m, and says "someone created this for me to see", he is to be envied.
Everest is a big deal. Tashi Tenzing, grandson of the great man and thrice on top, says so. He told me last week that while many had reached its peak, many also lie lost and lonely on the icy slopes.
Mountains we forget are living beasts and Everest is a goddess with the occasional nasty mood. Avalanches descend, harsh winds visit without warning, high-altitude cerebral edema kills. Anyone who has read Into Thin Air or The Boys Of Everest will tell you this.
These women are the first from Singapore and that matters. When a housewife from Tokyo does it, we applaud her. But it is different when the highest mountain is climbed by your neighbour’s daughter, by the girl down the road, by that woman in the supermarket.
It makes their feat more real, its impact sharper. My god, she, as tall as me, as slight as me, did it, so maybe I can, too. Maybe I can climb, trek, rappel, raft, fall from the sky and go deep into oceans. It is a beginning.
Kids here, everywhere, need to be introduced to their own planet, to a world beyond computer games and text messages, and these women are doing that with their feat. Not everyone has a yen for adventure, but enterprise and dauntlessness must be nurtured within those who own it.
Go discover a forest, son, traverse the Sahara, walk to a Pole. It opens the mind and pushes the body. The best adventurers are optimists for they see pain as temporary and barriers as negotiable. As the British explorer Ranulph Fiennes once noted: "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."
Every year, someone navigates an ocean single-handedly and every time the feat is fabulous because no water is ever the same. Such feats should be encouraged because if we don't keep challenging frontiers and ourselves, if we don’t keep romancing the great outdoors, we will lose something in ourselves, become more timid as a species.
These women will get no medal, no cash bonus, no cheering crowd. Where they went was quiet, lonely, cold, exhausting. But what they achieved was wondrous.
The great Indian poet, and thinker, Rabindranath Tagore, said: "You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water." These women went, they crossed, and we’re still staring.
