Maggie Doyne’s Blue Mountain is a testament to the power of seeing another human’s suffering and choosing to act. As a teenager, she set off to travel the world, but it was in Nepal that everything changed—when she met a young girl sifting through trash and realized she couldn’t walk away. With her babysitting savings, she built a home and a school, eventually becoming a mother to over 50 children and educating hundreds more. What struck me most was her willingness to go deeper—to follow the unknown, even when there was no clear roadmap. She writes, “I’m not the first white girl to cross an ocean with a backpack to try to find herself on (well, near) a mountain. I read Eat, Pray, Love, and I read it hard. I didn’t leave home to save the world. I just left to see it, to know it—maybe to know and see myself. But maybe seeing yourself is how these things begin.” 

Her book renewed my sense of purpose: that change isn’t about saving the world but about investing in people, one by one. As Maggie writes, “But still, there are girls breaking rocks in the river. Still, there are girls who never get to belong to themselves. Still, there are girls who believe they’re invisible. I can’t unsee them.” Like Maggie, a lot of people ask me: why do you do all this for women you don’t know, in a different part of the world? And I always find myself stammering out the same response: Because I have seen it, I can’t ignore it. And if there’s a chance I can change it, I have to try. And like Maggie, I used to mourn the life I could have chosen—one of ease and convention—but I find myself drawn ever deeper into the path that feels true. Perhaps that’s why her words resonate so deeply. They remind me that sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is simply refuse to look away.