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We went on walking along the ridge and found that there was no trail going down on the left as wehoped and the sound of the engine had long died out and the darkness of the sky left no room for arguing.A new problem that came up was that we didn’t have enough flash- lights.More than half of the group mem- bers had put their flashlights in the boat along with their backpacks. Therefore, our only option was to deal them out to cover the whole group. Those who didn’t have one would stick to the person walking ahead. Those who did, if they saw some dangerous pit, would use their flash- lights to point it out to those behind. Flashlights were no longer individual possessions but providers of light for three or four people each.At first, the trail along the ridge went up and down several times and every time it climbed up round a slope we hoped this would be the last hill before it took us down towards the stream which we knew must be down some mountain fault around here.But after an hour spent in darkness and no sign of any easy trail taking us down from the ridge, we felt the altitude decrease slowly, until around eight o’clock the jungle path began to descend steeply. There was no exit to the left or right of the ridge, but this meant we had walked to the end of the mountain and were coming to a flat plain.At the same time, it started to rain steadily. The trail, a 45-degree incline in some parts, turned into a slippery stretch of mud which soon multiplied the difficulty of our descent.I had been using my flashlight ever since the sky had begun to darken. That flashlight had three lithium batteries and sent a sharp shaft of light over a great distance. For all that, its main strength was also its main weakness: it couldn’t be used as longas ordinary flashlights or the bulb casing would grow so hot you hardly could hold it and before long the power in the lithium batteries would dwindle sharply.I had changed the three lithium batteries before eight o’ clock and while it rained on the trail that was growing less steep my flashlight became useless.In my years of experience in the jungle, were it lost in the jungle or trekking in darkness or going down a mountain in the rain, I had gone through all that, but having to face all those ordeals during the same hour wasn’t something that happened often, not to mention that I had to face them at an age when my stamina had dwindled and I had no overwhelming reason to face them.But then again, thinking back, I had stirred up all kinds of trouble as far back as I could remember and yet had never found myself entirely ready to deal with them.Or is it that real life has to be like this?That question brought to mind a book I had read not long before. It was lecture notes from a famous analyst of the soul named Osho. I had bought that book because of its title, Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously. In it, Osho-san writes: “Life is like that. You will never be ready for it. There is no way you can be ready for life, and that it changes without warning will always make you wonder: that is the beauty and the miracle of it...”From this, Osho concludes that to be alive in this world is something that demands courage, not only the courage of a warrior facing danger on the battlefield, but more importantly the daring to face uncertainty and a situation beyond the expectations of each era. “We have no way of know- ing what will happen... but don’t call this uncertainty: think of it as a mir- acle; and don’t call this situation in-security, because actually it is free- dom.”In my opinion, Osho-san’s definition of courage is like a sharp spear piercing the heart of the weakness of everyone, including me, because if we can get past this stage, then there is nothing to fear again. He said, “Courage is going towards a situation which we do not know and yet fear... Courage is to be willing to leave behind what we know for what we do not know, that is, willing to let go of the familiar for the unknown and willing to forsake comfort for discomfort to reach a destination which we didn’t know existed.”Who dares claim what he says is not true?Dark sky, falling rain, slippery slopes, dry throats deprived of water for hours...If you ask me whether I didn’t feel nervous in those conditions – of course I did. I felt tormented beyond words. With each step taken aimlessly, I kept praying for the trial toendbutatthesametimeIhadto suppress all feelings of stress and resentment to prevent them from surfacing. Most important was to prevent them from affecting my judgement.The rain that kept pelting in the darkness forced me to take out a plastic sheet to protect less my body from getting drenched than the camera bag on my chest. Camera and lenses cost half a pickup truck and if I let the rain spoil them, that much earned by the sweat of my brow would be washed away with the rain.But having to use both hands to wrap the plastic sheet tightly around the camera bag made my ability to walk on slippery ground almost dis- appear. Usually when walking in such a landscape, your hands must be free to grab a branch or swing your armsElite+ 61