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Twenty minutes below the pass, the weather turns. Is turning back the coward’s choice or the brave one?

Nima Tsering Gurung Fellow
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Virtue & characterBuddhistGreek & RomanAristotelianismAristotle#courage#mountains#practical-wisdom#risk
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Its coordinates: 3.2.3 Character-Based Approaches

Last season I was guiding two trekkers towards the Thorong La, which is 5,416 metres. About twenty minutes below the pass, cloud came over very fast and the wind changed. One client wanted to go on. He had saved for three years and flown from far away. The other was quiet. I turned us back.

Nothing happened, of course. Nothing happens when you turn back. That is the problem with being right about risk: nobody ever sees the accident that didn't happen. My client was polite, and very disappointed, and I think he believes I lost my nerve.

Aristotle says the courageous person fears the right things, for the right reason, in the right way and at the right time, and that courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness. That sounds wise in a tea house. On the mountain it is much harder to tell which of the three I was being.

So my questions:

  • When a guide turns back, whose courage is it? Mine, for accepting his disappointment, or none at all, because I only did my job?
  • Can it take courage to do the safe thing?
  • Does it matter that the brave choice and the cowardly one look exactly the same from outside?
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1 answer

  1. Choi Byeong-hun

    Fellow

    The hardest order I ever gave in twenty-two years was to stop a patrol and go back the way we came, on a night when a younger officer wanted to push on. Nothing happened either. He thought I was old and cautious. Perhaps I was.

    But Aristotle's list has one word people skip: for the right reason. If you turned back because you feared his anger less than the cloud, that's courage. If you turned back because you feared your own discomfort, it's not. Only you know which, and I suspect you already do.