Dancing Up The Wall

My heart was racing...my forearms, calves, and fingers were straining and stiffening with exhaustion. I could barely hold onto the wall anymore, but the fear of embarrassment was greater than the pain in my body, so I pressed on. "Just get to the top!", shouted the voice in my head. Panting and sweating, I slung both hands over the top edge of the wall while my friends below cheered. I backed down the plastic boulder until I could comfortably jump onto a well-worn crash pad. I smiled with pride of having completed my first V4 route of the day, and my eyes were already scanning the V5 holds before I had caught my breath.

My brain was telling me to go for it, but my grip refused to let me, so I shook out my arms and glanced around the gym, playing it cool. An older gentleman caught my attention. I had seen him there before--long sleeves, pants, bald head, and wrap-around earphones. He stood with hands on hips, studying the wall face in front of him. I watched him start his ascent as I dug my water bottle out of my bag. He stretched out a calm hand, placed it, looked at his feet, found an anchor, and seemed to float upward. Hand, foot, float, repeat. My heartbeat slowed as he rose up the route with gentle grace. I just had to know...what was he listening to?

My mind went back to the V5, and I decided to give it a try. Big mistake. I failed miserably after 6 holds. I knew I was done for the day, but my frustration fumed underneath the soreness. As I walked toward the lockers to remove my shoes and wait for my friends, I found the man again, studying another route. "Excuse me! I'm so curious...what is it that you listen to while you're climbing?" His face spread with a kind smile. "Classical music." I nodded awkwardly with a "that's cool" interjection. Then he said, "I like to listen to it, because to me, climbing is a dance, and classical fits my rhythm." I politely acknowledged his explanation as a pang of resentment shot through me. He was dancing while I was fighting fiberglass molds.

Ten years later, I still think about his answer on occasion. Why was it that he was enjoying the process while I was forcing an outcome? We've all seen the t-shirts, the necklaces, the tattoos that tell us to enjoy the journey. But in reality, it's very difficult to do. (Heck, even Miley Cyrus sings about it! "Ain't about how fast I get there, ain't about what's waiting on the other side...it's the climb.") Why have we become so hyperfocused on outcomes instead of the experience of what leads us to them? And not just outcomes, but also the way we judge those outcomes to be...what is good or bad or just mediocre. We seem to be wired for reaching the end goal at the cost of joy.

When I was working as a process engineer I was assigned to a team who had been hacking away at a project for over a year. It was a major initiative with a big budget and a hard deadline, and when that time came, the results were clear...nothing was going as planned. My teammates and I prepared the presentation, and shared the bad news with our leadership. I remember looking around the conference room, and realized that everyone seemed pissed except for the senior manager. "We can do our damndest to control the inputs as much as we want, but we cannot control the outputs." He said it with the tone and expression I now know as stoic. At the time I was confused. No one else seemed to care about how much work we'd put in...they only cared about the outcome. But I also felt a sense of relief, like he'd granted me permission to feel good about my effort.

Both in the rock gym and the workplace, it's so much easier for us to get fixated on outcomes than to realize the possibility of enjoying the moment. When we miss our targets we're left with dissatisfaction and general unhappiness. So, does that make goals the problem? Are we making ourselves miserable by chasing summits we'll never reach? In his seminal book on Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi claims that "...there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve, that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment." But what does it mean to enjoy the struggle, and why is that so hard?

I see enjoyment as having 2 parts. The first is facing a healthy challenge...doing something that is difficult enough to keep us from getting bored, but not so difficult that we are overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. The concept of flow is found in this middle state, where we can lose ourselves in moments of focused attention on the task at hand. We are challenged, engaged, alive, and thriving. The second is what Eckhart Tolle calls presence. When our minds are crowded with thoughts that distract us from the present moment, we easily tune into the judgements and fears related to achieving (or failing to achieve) our goals. We get easily distracted, emotional, frustrated. We don't particularly like these states of being, but it's where most of us live most of the time. But when we are present, we are free to enjoy the moments that actually make up our daily lives. Tolle argues that "to become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still." And one of the best ways to become present is to operate, as much as we can, in the balanced state of flow...the state of dancing up the wall.

Finding enjoyment can be a struggle when we are consumed by goals that we don't define and don't own. One source of these externally imposed outcomes is social pressure. Social media, advertisements, friends and colleagues all present us with options for what goals we could pursue, whether they intend to or not. We see endless possibilities for lifestyles we could live and things we could have, and get captivated by adopting them as plans of our own. And, especially when we are young, there are expectations placed on us by others, usually the most important people in our lives. So we feel pressured to want what is wanted of us, and we lose ourselves not in enjoying the present, but in the whims and desires of those around us. The end result is exactly where I found myself in a Delaware rock gym...exhausted, frustrated, and never satisfied with our achievements.

Csikszentmihalyi offers the following solution to this problem: "achieving control over experience requires a drastic change and attitude about what is important and what is not." Easier said than done. Finding out what is important to us often requires untangling signal from noise, which is challenging, if not impossible, to do on our own. While there are many ways to figure this out, for me it was uncovering the moments in my life that genuinely lit me up...the times that I was fully present and balanced. I had to let go of some beliefs about myself that weren't true and some expectations that weren't really mine. I also had to get honest about what in my life was stressing me out and what had become mind-numbing, and make some tough choices on where to dig in and where to back off. This is exactly what my program does: excavate purpose and sharpen focus.

A couple years after meeting the classical-music-climber I moved far enough away from the gym to make going there a hassle. I went less and less often, and each time I did make the drive, I left feeling more frustrated than before. My skill was declining, but my goals hadn't changed. I was out of balance. It wasn't fun. I stopped going altogether. When we moved to Austin I found a place much closer by. I've only been once so far to get a feel for it, but knowing what I know now, I'm excited to go back and find joy in the movement. I think I'll even wear my earphones.

🪷 Nora