The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. – Aung San Suu Kyi
Freedom from fear could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights. – Dag Hammarskjold
After El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, I noticed nobody was talking any more about the mass shooting in Gilroy, California. The Garlic Festival as a killing field.
Dozens of people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, including two mass shootings in less than three hours on Sunday. In all, seven people were killed and 46 others were wounded in shootings since Friday evening.
Not to conflate your normal routine everyday gun violence with your crazy-ass white terrorist mass murder.
Left the house the other day. Didn’t give it a thought.
Walking into a busy, ironically-named Target store, I saw a fat faded white guy scowling towards me in a stretched faded green t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan F*CK YOUR GUN-FREE ZONE. Coming right at me, like he was headed back to his car for a weapon. That’s what flashed through my head. Like the Guatemalan single mother at the Returns desk answered his questions wrong.
All I could think of… well, it was a scary thought. At least it wasn’t Rural King.
I took cover in the lingerie department. Anyway, he looked too old to be one on America’s mass shooters. Seems to me, if we want to end this epidemic, we need to get more young white boys laid. Ask the question on a background check. – JDW
5 Ways to Conquer an Impossible Task, According to a Pair of Death-Defying Rock Climbers
The documentary Dawn Wall chronicles Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s 19-day climb of El Cap. They came back with some valuable life lessons.
BY CLAY SKIPPER
What if, on the first day of a new project, someone told you it would take the better part of a decade to finish? Discouraging, right? But what if that person also told you that your new project would culminate with a 19-day stay on the side of a giant rock, attempting one of the most difficult vertical ascents in climbing history?
Well, then you’d maybe be Tommy Caldwell or Kevin Jorgeson, a pair who, in 2015, completed a seven-year journey to conquer a section of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan rock formation—called the “Dawn Wall” because it’s where sunlight first hits each morning. That historic trek has been captured in the riveting, suspenseful documentary Dawn Wall, first released in September, and available November 20th on iTunes.
The duo spent nearly three weeks climbing the 3000-foot sheer rock face, the first pair to complete a free ascent, a technique that allows for ropes to be used for safety, in case of falls, but not at all to assist with the climbing. (It feels worth mentioning that Caldwell, one of climbing’s most famous and successful athletes, climbs without a left index finger, which he lost to a table saw, enhancing the degree of difficulty of his feats to a level somewhere beyond impossible.)
The film will give you deep appreciation for the meticulous planning process behind the climb—laying out the 32 sections, called “pitches”—and extreme anxiety when they actually start to do it. But it might be even more valuable to hear them in conversation, discussing their approach to a task of that magnitude. Because even though their day-to-day is probably nothing like your day-to-day (please excuse this assumption if “scale a rock wall” is on today’s to-do list) we all have projects we can’t figure out how to manage or conquer. And the philosophies and problem-solving techniques behind their climb just might help you crack your own difficult (albeit slightly less vertigo-inducing) obstacles.
Know when to focus on the macro mission, and when to focus on the micro details
Rock climbing is an exercise that necessitates constant failure. Fall on a certain section of the route and it shows you how to better climb it next time. The only problem with that? Failure is discouraging. In order to cope with constantly falling short, Caldwell and Jorgeson stressed the importance of knowing when to narrow and widen the lens of perspective.
First, know that a macro goal can be daunting if you frame it as an imperative—but inspiring if you find a way to think of it as an experience. Not: “Damn, I have to get this done.” But: “Sweet. I get to do this.”
“On the Dawn Wall, if we were thinking about like, ‘We have to ascend this sick route,’ and that’s all we were focused on, it would have been a bit much for me honestly,” says Caldwell. “I was more thinking about, ‘Oh man, I get to go and spend a month in the most beautiful place in the world, working on this puzzle that’s really engaging and complicated’…It made it easy to come back and fail a lot but not get punched down by that failure.”
Jorgeson, similarly, knows that the line between feeling like you’re wasting your time and feeling like you’re in pursuit of something meaningful and grand is a thin one: “Moment to moment, I think it’s easier to have the doubt, saying, ‘What am I doing? Every day, I’m just getting my ass kicked.’ But then you zoom out, and you just look at El Cap, and you’re all inspired again.”
“If you’re trying a section of climbing, and you’re failing on 90% of it, but you’re succeeding on 10% of it, is that success or failure? I’m optimistic, because I’m pretty apt to focus on that 10% where I succeeded.” – Tommy Caldwell
The key is finding meaning in that long-term goal but not using it as a metric of day-to-day success. Why? A goal is a finish line, and you only get to cross the finish line on the very last day. (E.g.: If your goal is “read a book” or “lose 10 pounds” or “run a marathon,” it’s only on the day you finish the book or weigh ten pounds less or run the marathon that you’ve actually achieved your goal.) So at the end of each day, instead of asking yourself if you’ve finished what you set out to do, ask yourself if you’ve taken a step in the process of getting there.
“It helped us maintain motivation on a day-to-day basis,” says Jorgeson. “Instead of looking at it as unattained for seven years, it was like, ‘Oh we just want to do the crux moves on this pitch today.’ That’s a good day, as opposed to: ‘There’s one more day where we didn’t ascend the Dawn Wall.’”
“You zoom in,” says Caldwell. “You focus on the little details. ‘Yeah, I didn’t do that pitch today, but I figured out that one body position, so that was actually success. You morph it in your mind by changing your perspective… If you’re trying a section of climbing, and you’re failing on 90% of it, but you’re succeeding on 10% of it, is that success or failure? I’m optimistic, because I’m pretty apt to focus on that 10% where I succeeded.”
Of course, step-by-step only works if you have the discipline to show up for each and every step
After climbing the Dawn Wall, Caldwell decided he wanted to write a book. Unfortunately, he was a climber, not a writer. Then, he realized, he could actually use that to his benefit.
“I found out that the obsession that you learn through something cool like the Dawn Wall can be transferred to other things. Because if you’re going to climb a big mountain, you look up at it, and you’re like, ‘How the heck am I ever going to get to the top of this thing?’ But then you just start working away. Start at the bottom and just figure it out as you go.
“Writing a book is very much that way. You try not to think too much about the overall picture. You have to at the beginning to put the thing together, but then you just get down [to it].
“I would set my alarm for 4:00 AM every day, and I would get up. I would write from 5:00 until 1:00 or 2:00 PM. Every day, I would make that happen no matter what. Even if I wasn’t feeling it, you know? You just got to go and do it anyways.”
If you sign up for a challenge, don’t be surprised (or run away) when it’s challenging
Humans are a pain averse species. Which means that even if we know, intellectually, that challenges are going to come, we’re wired to try to run in the other direction—or take a shortcut—when they do. But when you’re living on the side of a rock—Caldwell and Jorgeson camped in a portaledge, which is basically a tent you bolt into the side of the mountain—you don’t really have that option. Which means, over time, Caldwell and Jorgeson have been forced to learn to run towards difficulty.
Take, for instance, pitch 15, an extremely challenging, mostly horizontal section of the climb that took Jorgeson seven days (10 attempts) to climb. Imagine that for a second: failing at something for an entire week, and, instead of being able to walk away or blow off steam, having to stay right there, in the shadow of the obstacle that keeps defeating you.
“If you go through some hard stuff in life, you start to realize that’s what shapes you. That’s what makes you who you are. Climbing is this way to do that on purpose.” – Tommy Caldwell
“Someone was asking me what it was like struggling with pitch 15,” says Jorgeson. “It felt almost appropriate. At least the very first night that I didn’t do it, my mindset was like, ‘Well, that’s about right. It’s supposed to be hard. That’s what you signed up for.’”
You always feel better when you push through to the other side of a difficult task, instead of backing out the way you came in. Next time you feel the urge to run away from the challenging part of a project, consider what you might do if you, like Caldwell and Jorgeson, had nowhere to go but intothe difficulty.
“You just let it come, and you live it. That’s part of the reason you’re up there in the first place,” adds Caldwell. “If you go through some hard stuff in life, you start to realize that’s what shapes you. That’s what makes you who you are. Climbing is this way to do that on purpose.”
Sometimes being still is the best way to move forward
Climbing something like the Dawn Wall is, you might imagine, extremely hard on the body. Unlike the hand- and footholds at your local climbing gym, El Cap’s are naturally-occuring and made of razor sharp stone. Caldwell and Jorgeson had intense rituals to keep their fingers and toes in prime shape.
“Every time we would attempt a pitch,” Caldwell remembers, “we would take off our shoes, we’d take a razor blade, and we’d shave off the little bit of rubber that had come up. Then we’d take a piece of sandpaper, and we would sand it a little bit.”
They also tried to climb at night, when it was colder, so there was less sweat and better friction between the rock and their skin. That, combined with giving their fingers and toes ample time to recover—Jorgeson had to take off two whole days to rest while climbing pitch 15—meant that the climbers spent a good deal of time waiting, not doing any climbing at all. Not taking that time would have risked further injury, and, in the long run, extended their timeline to completion.
When you’ve got a huge project sitting on your plate, your inclination is to blow through it as quickly as you can (especially in the age of productivity). But, in reality, sometimes the best thing you can do is rest, recover, and do nothing at all—putting yourself in a better position to knock it out when you come back to it, refreshed.
Risk is valuable—but only if you know how to control it
“One of the reasons we chose this route is because we felt like it was really exciting and engaging in that way, but we weren’t going to die,” says Caldwell. “Because the wall is so sheer, it’s one of these things that it seems ridiculously scary until you really start to analyze it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, no, I think this is okay.’ For me, that’s the perfect spot to be.
“The fear, early on in the process—especially for Kevin since he hadn’t been up there—it can slow you down. It can make you timid. It can make you not want to do it. But then, you get to the point where you can use it, and that excitement makes you perform better. It gets you in that flow state. You’re playing around with your psyche to try and get to that place where the fear actually helps.”
“You learn what you can get away with. You almost have to make the mistakes once and hope that they don’t kill you.” – Tommy Caldwell
This is Flow 101: If you’re underqualified for a task, you’ll drown in anxiety and doubt. But if you settle for something way too easy for your skillset, you’ll be bored while completing it. So stress can be useful, so long as it’s not toomuch. The key to locating that sweet spot is something Caldwell and Jorgeson both need to do their jobs well: self-awareness. They know exactly what they can and can’t do, and it’s that knowledge that allows them to exert control over the risks they take.
“We do want heightened experience, but the adrenaline rush is actually a bad thing in climbing. What I’m in it for is taking these things that probably should induce that and being able to control them,” says Caldwell. “The misconception is that we want to be wild and out there and crazy. No, we’re trying actually to be as controlled as possible in this very, very adverse environment. It’s the warrior mentality a little bit: You wouldn’t want a warrior that’s just freaking out on a high adrenaline. You want somebody that’s going to be able to be laser-focused and absolutely on point in the midst of something crazy happening.”
“Before the Dawn Wall, I did a bunch of highball bouldering that was super dangerous, but I would de-risk it by training and preparing for it and just virtually eliminating the chance that I would actually fall,” adds Jorgeson. “You can’t control gravity, but you can control how much risk you’re taking from moment to moment. Being aware that risk is relative helps you take risk in a super calculated way. Because you recognize what’s out of your control. When you get to that moment where it’s like, ‘Okay, this is slightly dangerous,’ you’re aware of it. You’re not just going into it being like, ‘Oh, everything’s fine.’”
In some ways, it’s not knowing the risk involved that’s the riskiest option of all. Push yourself until you find the edges of what you can do, and then maintain a constant awareness of where those limits are.
“When I’m out there high on some mountain, and the weather is coming in, I’m always the one that’s like, ‘Let’s just do it. We can handle this,’” says Caldwell. “That’s when I’m brought to life. Emotionally, I want to do it.”
“We were doing this big traverse high in the mountains in southern Argentina a few years ago. There was a section where we had to climb into this waterfall, and it was getting dark. We’re at 11,000 feet. We had to do it at that time of day to get to the top of this mountain, we’re right on the verge of hypothermia. Almost everybody would be like, ‘No, this is not worth it. I’m going to go down.’
“I was there with Alex Honnold, and he just doesn’t have that mechanism really. He’s just like, ‘Dude, of course, we’re going to do this.’… Once you’re in there, you’re just battling, and you’re just in the zone and making it happen.
“I just did a speed climbing thing on El Cap where you’re trying to climb so fast that you bring very little gear. Quite often, you’re a hundred feet above the last place that you’re clipped in, which means if you fall, you’re going to take a 200-foot fall. I’m really good at just charging ahead anyways. But then, I did take a 100-foot fall at one point, and then you’re like, ‘This isn’t good.’ You learn what you can get away with. You almost have to make the mistakes once and hope that they don’t kill you.”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/link-found-between-gun-violence-and-cowardly-politicians