I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

At the end of the ridge we leaned on our ice axes and looked up.
Above us was the legendary Hillary Step, the forty-foot ice wall that formed one of the mountain’s most formidable hurdles.
Cowering from the wind, I tried to make out a route up it.
This ice face was to be our final and hardest test. The outcome would determine whether we would join those few who have touched that hallowed ground above.
If so, I would become only the thirty-first British climber ever to have done this.
The ranks were small.
I started up cautiously. It was a long way to come to fall here.
Points in. Ice axe in. Test them. Then move.
It was slow progress, but it was progress. And steadily I moved up the ice.
I had climbed steep pitches like this so many times before, but never twenty-nine thousand feet up in the sky. At this height, in this rarefied thin air, and with 40 mph of wind trying to blow us off the ice, I was struggling. Again.
I stopped and tried to steady myself.
Then I made that old familiar mistake — I looked down.
Beneath me, either side of the ridge, the mountain dropped away into abysses.
<i>Idiot, Bear.</i>
I tried to refocus on only what was in front of me and above.
<i>Up. Keep moving up.</i>
So I kept climbing.
It was the climb of my life, and nothing was going to stop me.

Time passed, turning everything to ice.
Under the ice, the future stirred.
If you fell into it, you died.

It was a time
of waiting, of suspended action.

I lived in the present, which was
that part of the future you could see.
The past floated above my head,
like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

It was a time
governed by contradictions, as in
<i>I felt nothing</i> and
<i>I was afraid.</i>

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.

I took a deep breath and recited my vulnerability prayer as I waited for my turn: Give me the courage to show up and let myself be seen. Then, seconds before I was introduced, I thought about a paperweight on my desk that reads, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” I pushed that question out of my head to make room for a new question. As I walked up to the stage, I literally whispered aloud, “What’s worth doing even if I fail?

I am mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it's the only place where I'm happy.

Standing on the fringes of life... offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.

I stepped from Plank to Plank
So slow and cautiously
The Stars about my Head I felt,
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch — This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

This was my slender bridge to the future, and I stepped onto it as carefully as I could.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Her coming was my hope each day,
Her parting was my pain;
The chance that did her steps delay
Was ice in every vein.

Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.