Toe Shoes: A Solution

Lessons of the Peppered Moth

The Peppered Moth changing

It’s not just “survival of the fittest” anymore. It’s the adaptable, those most willing and able to learn, who persevere.

The world is full of people whose inability or unwillingness to adapt to changing landscapes left them out in the cold. Factory workers who knew only how to work in factories. When it became cheaper for businesses to send production overseas, the factories closed and the workers languished. They felt they had nowhere to go.

Likewise the young climber who prizes his fitness and skill above all else. In the height of his strength, he might imagine he will always be as he is now. He doesn’t consider what his life will be like when he is injured or his body no longer performs as it once did. He doesn’t consider the many ways to be happy and useful and fulfilled when things are different.

The case of the Peppered Moth is perhaps the most popular demonstration of Darwinian natural selection today. Prior to Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the mostly white Peppered Moth was thriving. The black variant of the moth was rare, its coloration poor camouflage against the pale trees on which it rested.

But the Industrial Revolution, with its machines and factories, brought change: soot particles that eventually darkened the trees on which the Peppered Moths rested. Now the darker moths were the better hidden, while white moths became easy pickings for keen-eyed birds. Lo and behold, the black moths became the more common variant for more than a century, until pollution regulations of the 1970s began to stem the sooty tide.

The difference between people and moths is that change for the moths comes only at the population level, through death and reproduction. When more black moths survive to bear offspring, the population grows dark. When more white moths survive to bear offspring, the population grows pale.

We humans, however, have a unique memory and intelligence that lets us adapt much more quickly. We can record our experiences and our lessons learned. We can share our knowledge. We can predict the future from the past and, in theory, act accordingly. This is one reason our kind inhabits so much of the planet — we are able to adapt within a single generation rather than over the course of many.

Still, many of us seem to live like the Peppered Moth, sitting and hoping desperately that the rules of the game won’t change so we won’t have to, either.

But the game is always changing. The sand of time drains ever down, drawing with it our bodies and minds. Technology destroys old opportunities and creates new ones. The changes in our climate are already set in motion. No matter how we fight or what we’d rather, the world we inhabit in 20 or 50 years will be very different from the world today.

When things change around us, we can be like the white Peppered Moth who sits on a black tree branch and waits for the birds to come. Or we can see the new landscape and make an effort to adapt, to lighten and darken our wings, or even shed our wings and grow gills. This is no mean task, granted, but the first step is to change our minds and attitudes, which is something the Peppered Moth can never do.

Good Luck and Bad Luck

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Good Luck / Bad Luck illustration

This weekend, I enjoyed reading Andrew Bisharat’s blog post called “The Games We Play.” Among other things, it talks about risk—in climbing, in more mundane activities like driving, and in life.

Andrew’s perspective on luck resonated with me. “It’s sometimes hard to know whether it’s working against you or actually on your side,” he writes, and then gives a series of examples to make his point. One in particular, about his alpinist friend’s knee injury potentially keeping him from a dangerous season in the mountains, read like a contemporary version of the old Chinese folk tale about a farmer and his horse…

One day, the horse escaped into the hills and when the farmer’s neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, ‘Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?’ A week later, the horse returned with a herd of horses from the hills, and the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, ‘Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?’

Then, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought that was bad luck. Not the farmer, whose only reaction was, ‘Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?’

Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg, they let him off…

Which of these events was lucky and which was unlucky? It’s impossible to tell at the time and a waste of psychic energy to worry about it much. We create our own burdens when we curse and celebrate every event through which we pass.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try hard. Work is critical—hard work doubly so—but there’s no need to see it as a burden. Instead it’s a privilege that we might try to perfect ourselves and work through the challenges life presents us.

Another example: In the late 90s, a dedicated climber named Josh was injured and had to sit out a season bouldering in the Gunks. It was an important moment for climbing in the area, relatively speaking, and Josh wouldn’t get to be a part of it. Bad luck, of course! But then Josh picked up a camera and made a video about his friends bouldering in the Gunks. The video was called Big UP, and it was the first step in what has become a very accomplished career behind the lens.

“One dream may hide another,” wrote the poet Kenneth Koch. When he was in full health, Josh’s dream of climbing might well have hidden the dream of telling climbing stories through video—a related but very different dream. His pain and injury uncovered this other dream, which perhaps was the more significant of the two.

It’s something to keep in mind the next time your project is chewing you up and spitting you off. Forego the wailing wobbler and instead consider falling as a sign that the climb still has something valuable to teach you. Therefore, the most appropriate response is to smile—because you have this chance to improve, because you’re climbing, because you’re alive at all, damnit!

Without fail, life will throw the kitchen sink at every one of us—how we see this and respond is what creates the “good” and the “bad” of it. On the one hand, this means we have much less control over our lives than we might think. On the other, we have much more control over ourselves than we care to admit.

Now is this good luck or bad luck?

Surviving A Honnold “Rest Day”

Climbing Yourself

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A climber climber herself

I’ve long viewed climbing as a meditation of sorts. It’s my time to focus on perfecting perfectly non-utilitarian goals. It’s all about breath and balance and giving just the right effort to hold on, not more or less. My goal is always to move with as little distinction between mind and body as possible — with what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.”

For insight into the relationship between physical action and meditation, I emailed my friend Thomas, a video game developer who lives in Vietnam. Thomas has practiced kung fu for 20 years, on and off, and engaged at various times in kendo, boxing, yoga, and Rinzai Zen practice. He’s climbed a bit, too. When I asked him about the use of martial arts as a way of moving towards higher states of consciousness, he recounted this anecdote:

In both [martial arts and climbing] you could perform strictly physically, or you could get in the zone and then you aren’t climbing. My Zen master had one kensho [an understanding of reality "as it is"] while fighting his kendo instructor. A clean hit stroke against his instructor, after which his instructor bowed to him. It is the only time his instructor ever acknowledged his ability. He describes the experience as ‘It hit.’

To this day in Japan, various physical arts are used as moving forms of mediation. Flower arrangement and tea ceremonies are two good examples. In such practices, the ultimate, selfless expression is described as the “artless art.”

Archery is another classic example. Zen in the Art of Archery, by the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel, is an interesting book on the topic. In the introduction, D.T. Suzuki writes that the practice of archery in Japan is “meant to train the mind … to bring it into contact with the ultimate reality.” When archery is practiced in this way, Suzuki writes, “the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality.

Herrigel’s book documents his six years spent in Japan studying with a master archer named Kenzo Awa. Herrigel describes the long process of learning simply to draw the bamboo bow with proper form. Still more time went toward learning to release the arrow with the same mindlessness as a leaf in a rain shower tipping to release its water. One day, after years of practice, he succeeded in loosing the arrow such a way. Awa stopped and exclaimed:

“Just then ‘It’ shot.”

In such instances, a simple motion, the result of years of constant practice, becomes the physical expression of a higher understanding. Herrigel had released hundreds, if not thousands, of arrows up to that point, but never without self-consciously doing so. To a master like Awa, the difference was instantly recognizable. Likewise, it is entirely possible that my friend Thomas’ master had hit his instructor in the past, but never before had “It” hit. From the outside, the experience might seem similar, but internally there is a profound difference.

It is very common for climbers to recount such experiences. When working to piece together a climb that rides the edge of our ability, we often enter a state where the movements seem to execute themselves. Holds that once were too far or too small feel closer, larger, right beneath our fingers and toes when we need them most. We flow through the climb acutely aware yet without consciously planning our actions. The climber and the climb, like the archer and his target, finally become one reality.

“Both martial arts and rock climbing require the practitioner to push body and mind … to work as a single entity in the moment,” Thomas wrote in his email. “And any time you do that, you’re scratching at the surface of existence.”

To me, there is no greater experience on a climb.

What about you? Have you scratched the surface? Have you felt “It” climb?

10 Tips for Climbing on Opposite Day

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Illustration of person climbing perfectly... on opposite day

Remember Opposite Day? That special time when we were kids where everything we said was magically inverted to mean the contrary? Such power we wielded! I recently discovered that January 25th is the pseudo-official date of this imaginary “holiday.” But in my opinion, the best thing about Opposite Day is that it can be invoked at any time — a sort of floating Shangri-La of sarcasm that materializes when called.

With that in mind, I have compiled the following 10 tips for how to climb on Opposite Day, for total beginners and experienced rock wrastlers alike. Follow these tips carefully to become a great climber… Not!

1. Hold your breath - Science has shown that only through holding your breath can you create the proper body tension required to climb. To prepare for vertical voluntary apnea, practice not breathing in a safe place close to the ground. That way, when you pass out, you won’t have far to fall. Recommended breath-holding practice locations include a sofa, bed, or crashpad. To be avoided: hot tubs, the high limbs of trees, a closed room containing a pack of hungry pugs.

2. Care about looking cool - Few things are more important to a real climber than appearance. Favorite skinny jeans and striped tank top in the washer? Better to stay home than to head to the crag. Feeling a little bland at the gym? Try getting an arm-sleeve tattoo, capping your matted crop of dreadlocks with an ill-fitting trucker hat, or growing an ironic mustache. The self-confidence you gain from your new appearance will be all you need to power you up the wall.

3. Carry as little water and food as possible - The only edible thing Clint Eastwood brought up the Totem Pole in the cult classic The Eiger Sanction was beer. And he didn’t even mean to bring that — his good-for-nothin’ partner slipped it in his pack. The takeaway here is that hydration and nutrition are for sissies. A good rule of thumb before a long multi-pitch day in the desert is: one tall glass of water before you leave in the morning and, if you feel you need it, another when you get back to your van. As for that gobbledygook about “bonking”? Go sit in an empty chair — Clint will tell you what you can do with your Camelbak and Clif Bars.

4. Use you arms – Can you do 10 pull-ups? Then you can do at least 10 climbing moves. It is commonly known that the best rock climbers have spindly little legs, and that’s because their lower limbs, like the human appendix, are borderline vestigial, used only for transporting their powerful upper bodies to the base of the climb.

5. Wing it – As it’s Opposite Day, I won’t hesitate to let you in on a little secret: belaying requires neither information nor practice. I mean, you pull the rope through the doohickey and then when your climber falls, you grab tight and hold on for the ride. It doesn’t matter how far the climber falls as long as he stops short of the ground. Or at least slows significantly before impact. And to answer your question: Yes, those rope burns on your palms are normal.

6. Throw your helmet in the trash - You probably have one of those friends who swears that it’s safer to drive without a seatbelt because, in the event of an accident, he’s likely to be thrown from the car and safely into a soft pile of dried leaves. Turns out your friend is right. And a similar logic applies to helmets. For example, if you’re struck by lightning, today’s modern foam-and-plastic brain buckets would almost certainly be fused to your head. Not worth the risk!

7. If you can’t climb it, chip it – There is more than enough rock in the world for everyone to climb. Therefore, if you’re trying to do something that’s just too hard, or maybe tweaks your shoulder a little bit, grab a hammer and a chisel and make like Michelangelo. No one will notice, and even if they do, they’ll probably thank you for transforming nature’s half-assed rocks into king lines. Boom goes the dynamite!

8. Freak out - No one ever climbed anything worthwhile with a level head. When you realize that you don’t have enough cams to protect the rest of the crack you’re trying to tackle, do the following very important steps: 1) contract all the muscles in your body. 2) Start hyperventilating. 3) Babble hysterically to yourself, the wall, and your belayer. 4) Start unclipping the remaining gear from your harness and flinging it into space. 5) Disrobe as much as possible. 6) Give up on life and climb as high as you can above your last piece of gear. Good luck!

9. Pump up the volume - Birds singing, a babbling brook, the whistling whisper of wind between the trees and boulders… Eff that ish! Time to bust out the iPod and portable speakers and blast some dubstep. How else are you going to get psyched?! Of course, once you’re up on the rock, breaking the rad barrier to the unrelenting, grinding pulse of Deadmau5, you’re also going to want to cut loose with some Ondra roars and unedited expletive explosions. How else will people know you’re not just out climbing some rock like all these other n00bs?

10. ABC (Always Be Climbing) - Any fast food chain owner will tell you: success isn’t about quality, it’s a matter of sheer volume. Climbing every day or even multiple times per day, is the quickest way to get stupid strong. Tendon pain? Partially dislocated shoulder? Exhaustion-induced illness? Meer bumps in the road to glory. Now get back on that wall and give me 20 laps.

The Importance of Respect

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respect

The first precept of karate is that it begins and ends with a bow of respect. If you respect your opponent, you respect yourself. If you respect yourself, you respect your opponent. Similarly, one of the four principles at the heart of the Japanese tea ceremony, rooted in Zen, is Kei, or respect.

I don’t physically bow to the rock before I climb, but perhaps I should start. I’m sure it would draw some funny looks, but it would also be a good reminder of what I’m doing there in the first place: looking for a challenge to help me deepen my knowledge of self and broaden my understanding of the possible.

When mountaineers speak of conquering or doing battle with a mountain or using siege tactics, they use the language of colonialism and war. They confuse the matter by implying that there is some sort of victory or ownership to be won on a peak. Words are easily disregarded as mere labels, but they influence our thoughts and our perspective even as we speak them. When a climber says he wants to “crush” or “take a dump on” a climb, it is funny in one regard, not serious. But on another level, it makes it harder to come to the climb with respect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great lover of nature. He saw it as our first teacher and a mirror to the self. “Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part,” he wrote in his oration “The American Scholar.” “One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind.” Climbing is an intimate interaction between human and stone — it teaches us through direct experience. Rock and body, nature and mind — all spring from the same source. When we puzzle out the lessons of the stone, we can’t help but learn something of ourselves.

Or at least, we can learn something if we approach the matter with an empty cup. When we come to a climb without respect or an interest in learning, we see nothing but a goal to be achieved. In such a state, we might wish to skip to the end by any means, as a child who moves his piece to the final square of a board game and mistakes himself the winner. We might want to announce our accomplishment or log it on a scorecard, but what we have really learned cannot be verbalized or assigned a numerical value.

I have never physically bowed to a rock, but perhaps I should start. Or at least make the bow in my mind. If nothing else, such a gesture will serve to remind me why I am here in the first place.

Hueco Lessons

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Hueco Tanks

I tendered my resignation via email from the computer in the Hueco Rock Ranch.

The year was 2007, and I found myself stranded in the Texas desert. My flight back to Ohio, back to my job writing words I didn’t mean for companies I didn’t care about, had been delayed due to ice storms slicking the country’s midsection. The upshot was a few extra days spent among the cactus and creosotebush, honey mesquite and soaptree yucca. I got to see the rock art of Cave Kiva and the Starry Eyed Man with his unique green pigment. With held breath, I spied a family of mowhawked javelina trotting through low vegetation. From the front deck of the Rock Ranch, I regarded the star-sprayed flank of the universe, sublime in the crystalline February night, and the neon yellow and orange sunrise in the morning. As I climbed, my bones and sinew played a tune on the textures of eons-old syenite porphyry like the needle of a music box clicking over its patterned wheel.

How could I go on doing something that didn’t inspire me in a world where places like this exist? I knew I had to make my way towards something more fulfilling, even if that meant multiplying the uncertainty in my life. I sat down at the small desk by the door of the Ranch and clacked together an explanation of my decision for my boss, certain in a way I rarely have been in my life.

What I take from this story is the power of a place like Hueco, where all kinds of time — geologic, cultural, and personal — intersect on an extra-dimensional plane not unlike “The Dreaming” aboriginal Australians speak of. I’ve felt a similar intensity of being in places all over the country and the world. Looking out over the autumn fire of trees gone red, yellow, and orange in the Shawangunks in upstate New York; staying in the deserted Mount Stapylton Campground in Australia’s Grampians National Park; hiking the serpentine trails of Antelope Island, populated with long-eared jackrabbits, bison, and antelope like some sort of parallel reality afloat in a great saline lake.

In a 2012 New York Times article, Eric Weiner talks of “thin places” — spots where the atmosphere separating heaven and earth narrows so much we can see to the other side. In such locales, Weiner writes, “for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again.”

“Thin places are often sacred ones,” the article goes on. It lists churches and mosques rich with history. Other thin places on Weiner’s list include airports, bars, Rumi’s tomb, the Buddhist village of Boudhanath, in Nepal… All very human places — places made by our hands and our conscious ingenuity. I too have felt a transcendental pulse in such places, but more often I find it in coördinates that evince little trace of human busywork.

This year I returned to Hueco for the first time since I wrote my resignation email. As I circumnavigated the giant jumble of textured stone known as East Mountain, our tour guide offered to take us to another of the area’s ancient petroglyphs.

“Can we please hurry up and get to the rocks you climb instead of the rocks with drawings on them?” said one of the other climbers on the tour, sounding like a spoiled kid. It pulled me out of the moment and reminded me that we climbers must approach the beautiful places where we ply our trade with eyes, minds, and hearts open. From the most broke dirtbags to the richest trustafarians, we do ourselves and each other a disservice when we climb with nothing but the masturbatory self-satisfaction of ticking projects in our hearts. We must remember that reverence and respect don’t stifle the mood of climbing but deepen it. In an era of rapid growth in our little sport, the time to live and teach this lesson is evermore upon us.

At Hueco, regulations abound. You can’t climb until the park is open and you must be out before 6 p.m. You need guided tours to travel in most of the park and must reserve spots for self-guided tours in the rest. Newcomers are required to watch a 20-minute instructional video before entering the park and several of the most popular areas — the Mushroom Boulder being only the most recent — are closed indefinitely to protect the fragile environment and cultural artifacts. Climbers, like artists, are an individualistic bunch. We chafe against rules and restrictions — I’m certainly no exception, but I also believe in the strange magic of places like Hueco. For me, the thing that makes such places thinner than the those I inhabit on a day-to-day basis is their natural state, the possibility of solitude, and the lingering echoes of eons past.

As climbers, we find ourselves in such places more often than most, and more than most we should respect and defend them. Thin places are keys to understanding important things, though what those things are differs greatly from person to person.

Back in 2007, Hueco helped me to see deeper into myself and make a simple decision that I’ve never really doubted since. “In thin places, we become our more essential selves,” Weiner writes. Once you realize such places exist, it’s no waste to spend the rest of your life questing to find them again and again.

10 Rad Valentine’s Day Gifts for Climbers

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organic_heart_pad_cutout

The life that appeals to your average American can seem hopelessly bland and sedentary to climbers. On the other hand, most folks probably view our best vacations as their worst nightmares, as the bumper sticker says. Same goes for Valentine’s Day gifts. If this sappy, saccharine holiday appeals at all to you and your chalk-dusted paramour, it’s likely you won’t be going the roses and chocolates route. To help the vertically inclined find a fitting token of affection for that special someone, I’ve compiled a list of 10 items that, while thoughtful, do their thinking just outside of the lace-embroidered box.

1. Heart-emblazoned crash pad – Bouldering pad maker ORGANIC is known for their custom fabric tops. For a very reasonable $25 additional charge, ORGANIC is happy to create a pad with a heart form (or other shape of your choosing) sewn on top. Now, every time she takes a digger from the top of some hairy highball, she’ll remember that she is loved, and the pain will recede that much more quickly. organicclimbing.com

2. Elite nail clippers – If you’ve ever experienced the feeling of untrimmed fingernails scraping against stone, snagging, tearing, bending backwards, etc., then you understand viscerally the importance of a good nail clipper. What better way to say, “I love you and I want you never to feel the discomfort of nails grown too long again,” than with a pair of the most badass clippers on the market. Klhip engineers their snazzy snippers from 440C surgical stainless steel to offer the most even, easy, and comfortable trimming experience possible. (Pro tip: take it to the next level and offer to trim your love dumpling’s nails for him. Hawt.) Just $89 with leather case. klhip.com

klhip

3. Beanie of the Month Club – If your bouldering partner (OK, probably a dude in this case) is the sort to always have a knit beanie (or toque, as they say north of the border) on his head, then this service is for you. Every month, HotHedz will deliver a new cap — wool, fleece, polyester-cotton blend, what have you – straight to his door… or P.O. box, in likely case that he lives out of his car. Not only will the Beanie of the Month Club keep him looking rico suave, but it will also reduce the particular odor that builds up when you combine frequent physical exertion with a bi-weekly shower schedule with his habit of sleeping with his hat on. HotHedz Beanie of the Month Club

4. Deluxe brushes – Sometimes, a clean hold makes all the difference. Discerning rock jocks grok all brushes are not created equal. When you’re looking for the best, only natural bristles like boar’s hair will do, the most popular brand being Lapis, a Slovenian hold company. Hair-care professionals and auto enthusiasts alike prize boar’s hair brushes for their softness and durability. Climbers know boar’s hair lifts more chalk and oil off of a climbing hold than nylon bristles, allowing for better grip, more success on the rock, and, by extension, a happier significant other. Lapis brushes via Liberty Mountain.

5. Couple’s sleeping bag – A good night’s rest is crucial for performance, but when sleeping two to a tent, those mummy-style bags can leave lovers feeling isolated. Why not double the fun with a tandem sleeping bag like the Big Agnes Cabin Creek Double or The North Face Twin Peaks?

big_agnes

6. Sexy clothes – Flatlanders head to Victoria’s Secret when it’s time to spice things up. For climbers, it’s Verve all the way. Founded and still run by Christian Griffith (who has climbed in at least one bouldering competition wearing little more than a thong and climbing shoes), Verve clothing is functional, stylish, and artfully accentuates the climber’s natural form [wink wink]. verveclimbing.com

7. Deep-tissue massage – Climbing is sort of like weightlifting, but instead of dumbbells, we throw ourselves around. No surprise then that many climbers suffer from muscle soreness, stiffness, and imbalance. A couple’s deep-tissue massage is just the thing to loosen those cranky fibers and unlock your and your partner’s climbing potential. Bonus: the sometimes-painful deep-tissue massage has been known to release not only physical tension, but also long-dormant pockets of emotional energy as well, which can deepen a relationship.

8. Climbing jewelry – Diamonds are great, but they stink for climbing (too slick!). Instead, adorn your lover’s ears and neck with sterling silver cams, carabiners, ice tools, and more. rockclimbingjewelry.com

9. Backpack-able wine bag – Long known as a “social lubricant,” vino can also loosen the tongues of those speaking the language of love. For those oenophiles among us, the PlatyPreserve Wine Preservation System is an excellent gift. These BPA-free plastic bags allow you to eek all the corrupting air out of your wine stash. Store it and a cool, dark place, and you’ll have the freshest tasting 2010 Climber Wine (limited release) in the Valley. Plus, the PlatyPreserve is lightweight, flexible, and won’t shatter in your pack. platypreserve.com

PlatyPreserve_web

10. Chocolate – Look, everyone loves chocolate, even if they choose to pretend otherwise. But climbers are a socially conscious bunch, so not any old Hershey bar will do. To ensure Cupid’s arrow hits its mark, try for something more sustainable, like a heart-shaped box of organic, fair-trade chocolates from San Louis Obispo-based Mama Ganache artisan chocolates. Such sumptuousness is only to be indulged in after your love sends his or her project, of course — motivation plus deliciousness equals the perfect climber cadeau.

What about you? Have you come up with any ingenious gifts for your on-and-off-the-rock partner?

Do You Have the Adventure Drive?

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The other day, I found myself too busy to take my dog for his morning walk. Bodhi’s a hyperactive blue heeler mix with big bat ears, a salt-and-pepper coat, and a little dark spot under his nose that looks, from a certain angle, not unlike Inspector Clouseau’s moustache. According to dogbreedinfo.com, heelers, or Australian cattle dogs are “a courageous, tireless, robust, compact working” breed and “not the kind of dog to lie around the living room all day” — a fair description of Bodhi, minus the “courageous” part.

I ignored the poor pup as he lingered around the legs of my desk proffering a sock for me to toss. Eventually he wandered off. A little while later, I heard the clack of Bodhi’s nails on the wood floor as he hopped down from the off-limits bed and sauntered back into the living room with a piece of tissue stuck to his lip. I walked into the bedroom to find used Kleenex from the trashcan ascatter on the floor.

“Bad dog,” I said without conviction, knowing I had only myself to blame, and made a note to play fetch with him on my lunch hour.

In the scheme of things, Bodhi’s pretty good. I’ve heard stories of dogs with excess energy taking shoes and furniture apart and even clawing through walls. On the ASPCA website, there’s a list of “Problems that Result from Lack of Exercise and Play,” which includes: “Destructive chewing, digging or scratching,” “Knocking over furniture and jumping up on people,” “Excessive predatory and social play,” barking, biting, whining, and more.

“Dogs are born to work for a living,” the ASPCA site goes on. “They’ve worked alongside us for thousands of years.” I would add that, prior to those “thousands of years,” dogs were wild for millions, made to survive in a harsh environment, hunt, compete for mates and resources, and so on. It seems the modern “couch potato” lifestyle doesn’t suit dogs any more than it does humans.

Yes, we too have been shaped by our environment over the course of millions of years — an environment without climate controlled suburban housing, cars, or even the Internet (!). Deep inside us there remain, at least in part, faculties that allowed our ancestors to weather brutal winters, fend off predators, hunt down large, powerful prey, and on and on. Our bodies and minds have been wired to respond in ways that make us more likely to survive. As a result, we are on some level built to deal with what most people today would call “risky” situations.

“Risk is an integral part of life and learning,” writes Laurence Gonzales in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. “A baby who doesn’t walk, for example, will never risk falling. But in exchange for taking that risk, he gains the much greater survival advantage of being bipedal and having his hands free.” Physical action and risk taking are a part of our survival programming. (Research has even suggested that exercise played an evolutionary role in the development of our brains.)

At the same time, there’s another powerful, and in many ways conflicting, motivator we all share — the drive to make the world more consistent and predictable.

Over the past century or two, we denizens of the so-called first world have moved ever farther in the direction of safety and predictability. We’ve extended our life expectancy through the elimination of predators, construction of complex shelters and food production systems, and the creation of ever-more effective medical procedures. We wear helmets when we bike, ski, climb, kayak and so forth (a trend I strongly encourage, by the way). Our lives, like our cars, have become insulated from the consequences of an indifferent world. Many of us now live in what folk singer Malvina Reynolds called “little boxes made of ticky tacky,” well removed from the past that formed our instincts. “We live like fish in an aquarium,” writes Gonzales. “food comes mysteriously down, oxygen bubbles up. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization.”

And yet, the survival urge lives on inside of us. In many of us, it rubs up against the bars of the human zoo, creating discomfort that cries out for action. It probably has something to do with why modern “adventure” sports like climbing, BMXing, snowboarding, big-wave surfing and the like have been gaining in popularity, especially among classes of people with access to ample food and shelter and leisure time. Isolated from the need to ward off threats lurking behind every tree, this instinct has in many of us taken the form of an “adventure drive,” in which we must face challenges that are at once physical, mental, and, to varying degrees, risky. This combination adresses a missing element in many of our lives. Disaster-style alpinist and margarita aficionado Kelly Cordes, waxed philosophical on such a drive in a video called “Somethin Bout Nothin”:

We do create situations where uncertainty plays big for us. But if you knew the result of everything in life, you almost get to a philosophical question: well, what the hell’s the point? … And I think that’s one of the cool things about alpinism: you end up being responsible for your own decisions, which doesn’t happen in today’s world hardly at all anymore.

With little chance to face primal challenges in our day-to-day life, certain types of people (disproportionately men, it seems… but that’s a topic for another day) seek out situations that exercise those faculties in their brains. There is a simplicity in it, and even at times a transcendental euphoria. When rockfall, originating in a couloir high above, zings by your head, societal worry falls away like a useless old husk. Assuming you have the appropriate skills and training, the raw challenge can be freeing, if only for a time, and ultimately an experience we can take back with us into the everyday world. If we’re smart and/or lucky, we can use the intensity of such experiences to see through to the marrow of our daily lives.

For some, the survival instinct remains just that. I’m looking at a magazine called Survivalist right now. It’s a thin, glossy publication with ads for food that will keep nigh-indefinitely in your bomb shelter, electricity-free water purifiers, and guns … lots of guns. The cover lines include such heart warmers as “How to Survive the Impending Martial Law & Economic Collapse” and “Breaking the Matrix of the New World Order.” If there’s one thing the editors of this magazine are sure of, it’s that shit is going to hit the fan soon. If there’s another thing, it’s that they and their ilk will be sitting pretty when that shit/fan thing happens. The third thing they know? All those yuppies who voted for Obama, drink lattes, and whose pantries are stocked with a measly week of provisions, are up a creek, sans paddle.

Clearly, I’m not a Survivalist subscriber, but that doesn’t mean I don’t empathize with the anxiety its readers feel. I think it springs directly from the new world we inhabit, in which many of our most powerful urges can be confusing, even harmful. Some of these remain useful, such as empathy and social bonding. Others seem to cause more harm than good now that circumstances have changed — our very understandable inclination to find and eat food, for example. In a country filled to brimming with cheap, nutritionally hollow, edible food-like substances, our survival programming has led to a health crisis of morbidly obese proportions. Instinctual fear of the unknown cuts both ways, keeping us cautious when confronting new things that might well be dangerous, but also creating deep anxiety in response to things that statistics and our rational minds tell us are incredibly rare, like shark attacks, commercial airline crashes, mass shootings, and the zombie apocalypse.

It would seem that, confronted with a significantly less risky world than the one our ancestors lived in for thousands of generations, we first-worlders are struggling to find a new balance. Could this explain why we choose to climb mountains and hurl ourselves off cliffs, or even horde ammo and stockpile duct tape and plastic wrap? Are our brains, geared for something more challenging than cul-de-sacs and cubicles, still searching for a way to express a deep survival instinct?

As opposed to the generalized anxiety that grows in a world where threats are removed from our immediate sphere, climbing “is a fear that one can understand because you have a reason to be anxious or frightened at that point: you don’t want to fall,” said the writer Matt Samet in an article called “Risks and rocks: the mentality behind the mountain.” “It makes sense in a way that’s not chaotic. So in a way that’s the cure for the angst I feel in modern society.” Samet battled for many years with depression, anxiety, and a confounding addiction to prescription medications, all of which he documents in his book Death Grip. The immediacy and primal simplicity of climbing helped him to cut through the fog of his psychological afflictions.

I’m the first to admit that without significant research and study, this is just another theory, half-baked and three-quarters cocked. But if it’s true that many of us require stimulation beyond video games, golf, or the latest episode of Dancing With the Stars to feel right inside, I’d posit that a day on the rock, on the slopes, or in the waves is healthy, despite the risk. Yes, there is danger there, but a meaningful danger, as opposed to the more insidious kind we face from our modern lifestyle, where cancers slowly grow, arteries gradually clog, and — despite or maybe because of our declawed environment — people inexplicably commit suicide by the tens of thousands every year. These are the dangers of carefully constructed cages, creeping, persistent, terrifying in their banality.

In truth, the ideal is to have a life that is relatively in control and safe, in which we needn’t fear attackers or worry about getting enough food to survive. Then, moving from such a stable base, we have the freedom to choose which risks — whether on a mountain, in our careers, or intellectually — we take, and how to take them. This is an impossible reality; humanity will never succeed in eliminating all risk from the environment. And it’s worth remembering that, even if we could, death will still await us all. Nevertheless, it is worth striving for.

Thus, I wish you all the satisfaction of coming home safely from an epic adventure to a warm house, a good meal, and to your family and friends. There’s not much that can beat that.

The Stone Mind

Exploring the intersection of mind and stone