Ten brave souls believed they could summit the very broad peak and they did – they just decided not to come down but stay there for good. That happens when you find just the right place sometimes, and do not wish to move.

I just resigned from a workplace that was increasingly becoming alienated from the me who lives inside me. You know the one who does not talk but lets you know. Who does not sing but makes you dance to the rain drops, and who certainly never takes any decision but keeps prompting you to take one.

Closing in on the 60th birthday – well quite a few months to go – I have just resigned to mutual understanding that both the organisation and I have different roads ahead. Not that I was not thinking about it, but you know how you dilly-dally till you cannot. Also, because at fifty-nine, it is only natural to look at the hexagonal milestone with a fat zero not too happily. For it permits none of the flimsy sleight of hand that let the forties and fifties pass themselves off as the new thirties. It carries instead a ring, more like the clang of a bell from a distant temple on a mountain.

So here I was, climbing that mountain, hearing the clang, wondering whether I would reach the summit, or pause somewhere along the way, look down at the vista, congratulate myself on finding a new perspective altogether, or whether it would simply be downhill from here.

I called a friend last week, an environmentalist, an architect, a good friend. He had left his position at a firm he jointly owned, for the same old reason that "our vision" had gone in two different directions. I caught him sketching in the meadows, an ancient castle he tells me. Well working in Scotland has its advantages, you can step outside and sketch a cliff, an angry wave, a solemn tree, just like that. You live permanently among the Tennysons and the Wordsworths and the Shelleys. The old castles and their surrounding mists are your neighbours, and they never move away. Paul was full of excitement. This is your time, he said, to listen to the mountains. Go. Write there and then decide whether you wish to climb or to pause somewhere. The mountains will answer you. I know exactly what he means. He is a passionate, ardent traveller who has never believed that a clock has any business telling him what time it is. He had bought himself a motorcycle to travel from Nepal to Scotland, sketching all the way. I am different.

I get scared. Yes, I do. For all my bravado and my confidence, the radical frightens me. I cannot take a leap of faith unless I am pushed out onto the jutting edge. I doubt the “me” sitting inside. She after all has it easy. I have miles to go I would say. The “me” laughs, she says you have yet to enjoy the miles you already covered, it’s time to pause, think, reflect. So here I was pushed to stand on a precipice -- fearing vertigo, being indecisive, when I read about the Broad Peak incident.

An avalanche took ten of our most daring mountaineers. Among them was Sohail Sakhi, the only Pakistani in a group that also included climbers from Nepal, Oman, the United States, and China. They were ours in the way that anyone who chooses to defy the mountains and eventually becomes one with them belongs to all of us. Mountains love their rebels. I think of Nadhira Al Harthy, in her scarf and her shades, young, vibrant, and beautiful. I think of Nirmal Purja, fearless, quick on his feet, a face many of us already knew from the Netflix series that followed his quest to summit all fourteen of the world's eight-thousanders. I think of Mallory Geis, who shut down her Pilates studio for one last plunge. I see them laughing in the face of that slashing, icicle rage, telling it to mind its own business, their souls swirling up to meet the cyclonic rush of sparkling crystals, while the rest of us, down here at sea level, only look up. These ten are already becoming timeless stories, while we crane our necks to watch. We will never understand their adrenaline, their exhilaration, or even their reckoning, in the knowledge that they and the mountain mutually decided to stay together. No resignations here forever.

Just so you know that Broad Peak is the twelfth highest mountain in the world, standing at the very juxtaposition of the tectonic plates that raised it. It earned its name from the British geologist Martin Conway, who called it broad for the simplest of geological reasons: a solid mile of flat ridge running along its top. The local Balti name, Falchan Kangri, means the same thing.

Mountains are the strongest expression of stubbornness -- they do not move and they insist on making you move. They housed the first of us in caves, they gift the travellers and explorers with new worlds, they accept the climbers as their closest friends, they play with the clouds, hoodwink the sun, romance the moon and the stars, and if you lie down in an unpolluted zone (no light) they allow you to see the hurtling galaxy in all its splendour.

The incident has shaken me, not because I had watched Purja's series, or admired his commitment to bringing glory to the Sherpa mission or found something moving in an American woman's sudden decision to close her studio for one final ascent. It has shaken me for my own lack of gusto, for my insistence on the trivial as a way of marking my existence.

The peak of life is broad too, and I think life has brought me to just the right plateau to take the next step. To be myself. To enjoy my climb, stand atop the pulsating rock, walk the valleys, feel the water running through my fingers. To write, to speak, to connect with myself and with the people around me, and above all, to live, because we never know when the final crystals of some divine avalanche will come down to claim us, and carry us, one way or another, into the spirit of something much larger than ourselves.

My next destination for now is the mountains in our gorgeous north. No vlogs, no videos -- just quiet walks and conversations. Maybe some will appear in writings and some will find their favourite destinations and stay there only.

The objective being to continually explore the broad peak of life and look for destinations that may just wish you to stay forever. Otherwise keep moving like the gurgling rivers, and the galaxy, and enjoy.

The writer is a communications specialist, speaker, and an education strategist, and can be contacted at shaha.jamshed@gmail.com

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer