There is an item on my to do list called “cold temperature management” and it is not an easy one to deal with. I asked some fitness trainers about it and my question completely baffled them. In my mind, knowing for sure I’ll be exposed to temperatures lower than I’ve ever imagined and not preparing for it is madness. If you google it up, you’ll run into Government of Canada’s “Seven steps to cold weather safety” and calf management tips for cold weather, but neither of the two will going to help me climb Mount Everest.
Believe it or not, I am looking for the method to unlock whatever form of energy people used thousands of year ago to keep warm. Maybe clothing companies and electricity ones made that important knowledge disappear to be able to sell their products, or people just forgot about it. As I have no heater on the Everest and clothing may not be enough, I need to dig beyond the everyday keeping yourself warm methods.
Very vivid in my mind is the image of a Tibetan monk going up the mountain with wearing a wet robe and meditating there on the snow for hours. In a magical way the robe gets dry and the monk spends the night on the snow and wakes up refreshed to meditate some more next morning. The image is from a documentary I watched as a kid and it stuck with me. How does he do it? Even if I looked for answers over the years to various mathematical and financial questions, I neglected looking for the answer to this very important one.
After some research I ended up enrolling to Iceman’s fundamentals class, Iceman I mean Wim Hof. Even though his methods arise from a combination of personal intuition and ancient techniques and sometimes I automatically ask myself if what he preaches makes sense or not, I think it is a good start. Cold showers, a lot of deep breathing, pickling your hands in iced water...you name it. If this is going to help me hike through snow in shorts, it would be foolish not to give it a try...maybe it will actually get me someplace else.
Deep down I feel that you can be guided and taught, you can read, and you can listen, but the true wisdom comes from within yourself and only if you reach the point where you are worthy of it. You won’t find it written in any book and no one can pass it to you.