Humility of truly great people shows the way to contentment

Reading stories, as hyped as they may be, about people who overcome tremendous odds to achieve great personal goals has always fascinated me. These are people such as Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb to the top of Mount Everest; Heinrich Harrer, who was a member of the first climbing party to conquer the North Face of the Eiger (the Death Wall) and who later wrote Seven Years in Tibet; Sir Ernest Shackleton, who survived an epic to rescue his men trapped on a rocky beach in the Antarctic and even Chuck Yeager, the first person to break the sound barrier.

What unites all these adventurers, in mountaineering, ocean-going yachting, space flight or whatever, is not their arrogance about being winners, nor their conceit in their achievements but their humility. It’s as if they have been to the edge of their lives, and come back free of the need to prove anything to anyone.

I know, I sat next to local Everest hero Andre Bredenkamp recently. You’d never have guessed that he’s been to the top of the world and back, and successfully climbed to highest peaks on seven continents. He didn't have to prove anything, not even to the waiter.

What a contrast these honourable people were the arrogant spike-hair-gelled twit, for example, in the fast lane at Hospital Bend this week hooting like a banshee at anyone trying to cross from one lane to another.

What is it I wonder, that defaults us to arrogance rather than kindness? I know how often I have fumed at someone trying to “sneak” in front of me, as if one more car in front of me in the snarl-up will make any difference at all.

This is what happened to me around about Christmas time. Every morning during my walks on the beach opposite Sunrise Circle, I noticed a group of about five of six women walking back and forth from the shoreline to the dunes trailing long tubes of kelp behind them clearing the section reserved for swimming.

They appeared to be a rather sulky bunch resigned to their work. One morning I walked up to one and said, “Thank you for cleaning the beach. You are doing a really great job and I would like you to know it’s appreciated.”

Well you can’t imagine how surprised, how happy and how animated she suddenly became. It was as if her world had changed. She giggled, shrugged her shoulders and replied that it was a pleasure or words to that effect. And she looked a lot happier a than she had been a few minutes earlier.

Since then I have done the same to a number of invisible people, those we choose not to see; people such as the garbage collectors, the traffic police, and a policeman I saw in gym the other day. What an amazing reaction I get every time.

Not once has anyone barked back any snarky comment, or given me the finger as they might were they being criticised. Instead I get a radiant smile, “It’s what we do. Thank you.” They say.

So, to make my life happier, I have decided to let people into the traffic ahead of me, say “with pleasure” to the person in the shopping queue who wants to dart back to a shelf to get something without losing a place in the queue, and I will, as often as I can, in the words of a wise person I know, not let other people and their, rudeness or arrogance “steal my happiness”.

It works for me. It’s about how we care and what we care about, that’s important, not what we achieve. Had Tensing got stuck within reach of the Everest summit, would Hillary have stepped over him on his selfish way to the top? No. He would have given up his goal to save a friend. In his description of that climb, answering to the argument of who was first at the top, Tensing wrote. “ ..then he stepped up and I stepped up after him….’

And that’s about as humble as it gets.