Hiking on Kili: Phil, Don’t close your eyes.

The main ascent starts just before midnight, that’s how it’s done. After creeping up the mountain for six hours, there comes a sunrise on the top of the world’s largest single volcanic mountain. And yes, it’s spectacular. If you remember it. Some photos, then begins the descent. At that point, if you’re as unlucky as me, altitude sickness will have it’s way with your body. Brain swelling/edema is the biggest risk but for me it was the breathing and beginnings of pulmonary edema. The months of training kept the legs going but no point if there’s no lung capacity. The only medicine is lowering the altitude. But there came the most overwhelming wave of sleep. I cannot truly describe how absolute, all-enveloping and compulsive the feeling. All I wanted was to take a short nap then I’d get up and keep going down. And that would have been my end. My guide saved my life. He wouldn’t let me close my eyes. Now, he had a bottle of emergency O2 but I guess he just went old school on me. It was four hours of “Phil - don’t close your eyes!” 
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Sartre quipped in typical cynical fashion, “Hell is life without eyelids.” He meant that we ignore the hard ugly and shitty things in order to maintain a pretty fiction. I think the Kingdom of heaven is life without eyelids. Closing our eyes and pretending it’s all ok leads to death. even if it’s hard to look, even when it takes every single bit of energy you have left to keep open, we must do so. We must see. We must act. We must participate. We must keep going. Phil don’t close your eyes. I vow never.