Suman Karthik, a 43-year-old marketing executive and amateur mountaineer, vividly recalls the moment of her pandemic epiphany. It was in May, when she was in a Zoom meeting for her Seattle-based company. Earlier in the year, she and her husband both caught COVID-19, and they’d each spent several weeks in the hospital.

“I remember sitting there that day thinking, ‘I can’t do this. I’d rather be using my energy to climb mountains than be in another meeting.'”

So she quit. In October, Karthik, who lives in Bangalore, will travel to the Indian Himalayas to practice alpine style climbing and in the spring, she will attempt her lifelong ambition of scaling Mount Everest. “I can always get another job, but this is the only time when I have the ability and the strength in my body to do this,” she said. “If I don’t climb now, when will I?”