At the start of my trip, my blog posts ran two days behind my travels; now, thanks to a lack of time and cell service in Yosemite Valley, I’m up to four. It’s tricky, managing the flow of two separate timelines. Both are equally real to me; I’m seeing double, glitching space-time.
Cognitive scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have written extensively about the Experiencing Self vs the Remembering Self. We experience life as a succession of moments—around 500 million in a 70-year life, if the measure of a “moment” is three seconds. At any moment, our rich individual pasts and infinite possible futures form an hourglass of human experience. At the center, where the sands of time flow, is a present singularity that never stands still. The sands twist and writhe in a blur. As fast as a moment arrives, it disappears forever. There is something haunting and tragic about this, the succession of ungraspable moments that wink out of existence the instant they are born. The fragile, ghostlike Experiencing Self dwells in this instability.
The elusive nature of present experience means that we spend most of our time as a Remembering Self. This more stable, permanent self gives us solid purchase in the world, but living in remembrance comes at a price: our experience is already distilled, reduced, compressed into memories. What our brains store and retrieve is imperfect, not wholly reliable, and filtered through the interconnected web of every other past experience. This is the subject of Kahneman’s and Tversky’s research on this front: the cognitive distortions that drive a wedge between a present moment and our memory of it.
A well-lived life thus entails hard inner work on two fronts: training ourselves to live more fully in the present, and becoming better custodians of our own past.
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Virtually every religion and wisdom tradition acknowledges a critical truth: a good life requires living mindfully in the present moment, fully experiencing what it offers, and welcoming that moment with positive regard.
Most of us, myself included, are so fretful over the past and future that we fail to experience the rushing torrent of moments that constitute our lives. Mindfulness practice trains us to slow down, relax our concerns about the frozen past and unwritten future, and live the life we actually have. When one slows down and pays attention, any moment can be unfurled into a nearly infinite landscape. Mindfulness classes teach students to spend an uncomfortably long time observing a single flower petal, or resting a single square of chocolate on their tongue. As the initial discomfort or embarrassment subsides, the senses awaken. Unnoticed details emerge. The object of contemplation comes to life, takes new forms, dazzles in its intricate complexity.
After learning to dwell in a present moment, students of mindfulness must learn to receive it compassionately. This is easier said than done, as anyone who has practiced meditation or prayer knows. The mind reels and bucks against stillness. Anxieties over past and future crash over our bulwarks. Our evolutionary instincts, calibrated to keep us alive in a dangerous world, continually scan for threats and attune us to every possible hint of negativity. Through hard inner work, we can learn to re-train these responses. Stephen Covey, inspired by Victor Frankl, wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Mindful contemplation can create rapturous moments, in which we wake up to the true magnitude of the universe. We are immersed in a world so enchanted, vibrant, and wondrous that it takes our breath away. These moments are heartbreaking—full of indescribable beauty, but also devastating in their revelation that we can only experience the tiniest fraction of what the universe offers. The saints among us, both religious mystics and secular naturalists, seem to dwell in a magical haze of present experience; they live in a different world than the rest of us, more enchanted, more fully alive.
Modern psychology confirms what our religions and wisdom traditions have told us for millennia. Buddhism, Stoicism, religious mysticism, experimental psychology, cognitive based therapy, flow, productivity hacks—all converge on the vitality of learning to dwell more fully in the present.
Thus my first, continual challenge on this trip: to live fully in the first timeline, the one in which my Experiencing Self hurtles forward through time.
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Today’s climb is a new route for us, as we work our way across the routes at School Rock. This one is called Junior High, and the guidebook describes it as a gentle, easy route for a new multi-pitch trad leader. Exactly what I’m looking for. The route offers two starting variations: a 5.8 crack, or an easier 5.6 traverse across an angled slab. I opt for the slab.
When we arrive at the base of the route, my confidence evaporates. I need to traverse sideways for about fifteen feet across an angled ramp. Traversing (climbing sideways) is always scary because falls tend to be nasty, involving big pendulum swings, possibly slamming the climber into rocks or other features. If the rock has sharp features, a pendulum fall can sever the rope. Falls are also risky for the follower, who is not underneath the rope; they’re subject to the same type of pendulum swings as the leader.
Two other features make this particular intimidating: there’s almost nowhere to place protection, and if I slip, I’ll slide right down that ramp into a pit of sharp, broken boulders beneath.
Although the climbing looks easy—shuffling right across a thin, consistent ledge halfway up the ramp—the fall consequences make this one of the scariest trad pitches I’ve led.
I always feel sheepish, describing these climbs as if they’re some epic adventure. Figuratively, I’m just splashing around in the kiddie pool. My friend Sam urges me not to downplay my accomplishments. Even if these climbs rank lower on the ladder of climbing achievements, they still require knowledge, skill, and concentration and would terrify most people.
I climb up to the thin ledge and inch my way to the right. I manage to place my tiniest cam in a crack a quarter of an inch wide. It doesn’t seem likely to hold in a fall. Then I go further right. Now I’m in the no-fall zone: I need to move another ten feet, with so much rope out that the cam won’t keep me off the ground even if it holds. I spend a long time stationary, scanning for somewhere to put another cam. There’s nothing. I have to trust myself and move out.
Eventually I do, and my fingers soon curl around a positive handhold at the end of the traverse. I place a solid cam. Thank God. I make an awkward, clambering, “beached whale” move onto the next rock up, placing a couple more cams as I go. The guidebook says to climb another crack before building a belay anchor, but I decide to stop here. It’s an awkward spot, highly exposed over a sheer dropoff, without much room to stand; once I build the anchor, I have to lean back over the void, letting my tie-in rope go taut, to find a stable stance. On the positive side, I can watch Hannah make the traverse and rappel down if she has problems. Fortunately, she doesn’t; she breezes through the traverse, climbs up onto the ledge, and ties in next to me. She passes me the cams, flakes the rope, and prepares to belay me up the next pitch.
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One reason climbing enchants so many people is that it collapses human experience into the present. Mind and body become totally absorbed in the task of moving safely over rock. Past and future vanish; the present swells in size, becoming as solid and graspable as the granite itself. Climbing delivers pure, intoxicating life to the Experiencing Self.
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That leaves the other timeline, which sometimes gets overshadowed in our quest to more fully inhabit the present moment: the Remembering Self.
I have considered myself a writer since kindergarten, but the nature of my writing has evolved over the years. I’ve written academic journal articles, national security op-eds, and science fiction stories, but the lion’s share of my writing recently has been journaling or memoir—a challenging genre that leaves one open to accusations of narcissism, not least of all from one’s inner critic. I have to constantly remind myself that sharing one’s life with others is a generous act, and that my writing might offer guideposts to others as they navigate their own lives.
But I also write for myself, especially now, on this trip. This extensive personal writing has taught me a powerful lesson: reflective writing grants the opportunity to live life twice.
Reflective personal writing allows a person to intentionally guide their Remembering Self through the past, fusing memory, interpretation, and imagination. When I re-enter a memory, I e-live the experience. I recall my sensory impressions and emotions. I make connections to other memories, to things I’ve read, to deeper meanings that might have eluded me at the time. By writing, I crystallize the memory into harder and more durable form.
Writing about memories ultimately shapes how we remember them, which is a sacred power not to be taken lightly. Writing assigns interpretation. But the alternative is letting unconscious forces do all that shaping and re-shaping for us. Carl Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Writing about memories also attunes the mind and heart to the details and subtleties of human experience. By sifting through memories, we become better students of the present. We learn how to pay attention to those onrushing moments as a writer would, ravenous for every detail.
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Sitting here in the coffee shop, I recall the rest of my climb up Junior High. Each choice I make now, each word I commit to the page, will define how I remember this climb.
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According to the guidebook, the rest of the climb should be easy. Still, I don’t like the unknown. Our second pitch is straight up an easy crack with good protection, but from our belay anchor, I can’t see what lies over the top. The only way to find out is to continue up, deeper into the unknown, further committing to the route.
(A constant theme in my writing, my inner critic warns. I’m being repetitive. Inner journeys, standing at the cliff edge of one’s abilities, daring to go further.)
From the top of the crack, it’s an easy clamber up to a gnarled tree embedded in the rock like a wise sage in some austere alpine monastery. I sling the tree, then back it up with a cam just in case today is the day this ancient tree decides to surrender to its inevitable demise.
(I like the metaphor of a sage, but it falls apart in the second sentence. I could do better. If I was revising my work, I would polish this to a sheen, but I’m not revising; I’m writing fast and loose.)
I belay Hannah up. From here the climbing is trickier. In the guidebook, dashed blue lines spiderweb up a photo of the rock face, indicating multiple possible routes, some easier than others. I opt for what I think is the middle route. The climbing isn’t hard, but after a short ways, I want to protect a specific move. I need my blue Totem cam, but I’ve already used it. I build another anchor, taking my time, in no rush, content to choose safety over speed. Hannah joins me and passes me my cams.
(Is this play-by-play too boring? Who would even read this? Ignore those questions; keep writing…)
It always feels so good when Hannah passes me the gear I placed on the previous pitch. I clip each one back on my harness, where it will be available to protect a move on the next pitch. Hannah told me once that each time I place a cam, she silently thinks the names of my children. That black Totem is for I… the blue C4 is for M… the hex is for C. An ongoing cycle, keeping this sport as safe as I can make it.
We feel exhilarated when we top out. Even though most of the climbing moves were easy, this was our hardest multi-pitch climb yet. We’re getting better, a little each day.
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And here I am in the coffee shop, weaving all these memories and reflections together as though on a loom. As I surface from flowful reverie, my mind flickers between Remembering Self and Experiencing Self; past and present; days-old climb, and Hannah sitting across from me penning a handwritten letter to a friend. The future leaks in: thoughts of this afternoon’s planed climb, and planning logistics for the rest of our trip.
I’m out of the zone, human again, sloshing about in the eddies where time’s many rivers meet. But hopefully a better human now, more alive to the present, more alive to the past.