There’s nothing like tackling one of life’s oldest taglines to make you seem bitter and jaded: “Focus on the process, not the result.”
It’s an old line that seems, year by year, to be increasingly at odds with our market-driven culture and the high price we put onto image and success. In life we place a lot of value on performance, and climbing is no different. We use our North American yardstick, the Yosemite Decimal System, to capture a unit to grade a line’s difficulty, its most brutal physical move. Never mind that the grade is being applied by just one person, she who climbed it first, with body proportions unique to her and her alone. Yet we chase these numbers and use them to spur us on, to motivate, to rank ourselves, to erase our failures which we lay bare on the cliffs and walls and to justify whatever lengths needed to get it done.
Whether it be a small boulder, a cliff, a wall or a mountain, reaching the summit is the conventionally understood marker of success.
“Did you reach the top?”
“No, but…”
Say no more, my sad friend; your whole effort was in vain and has already been erased from the annuls of our collective reality.
I’m really just speaking in hyperbole here, though, because anyone who’s struggled with anything knows that the insights come along the way and on reflecting back, not at that moment when the summit is reached. Today I reached the top of a medium-sized boulder in the forest. I had worked on this semi-diligently for months this summer and as I laid hands on the final holds and high stepped into the moss, my mind was already on the next, unclimbed challenge. Insane, unsportsmanly or taking the experience for granted, you might say, but this is very typical of a climber’s goal-driven mind.
Luckily I’m a human being, and the next seven steps through the moss started the cascade of memories connected with the journey I’d been on to reach my tiny summit. And the cascade continues even as I write this column, climbing and re-climbing the problem with all the happenings along the way. What had I learned from this process and why was the summit so quiet and unremarkable an experience? My climbing had improved a bit, but could I re-climb this line every time now? No, probably not. Luck, chance and repeated efforts were all at work.
All the many tiny strings came together today and pulled me up to the top, but the top was but a tiny barren place compared to all the climbing I’d done to get there. We are conquistadors of the useless in every way because reaching the summit, exploring this terrain serves no outward purpose. Climbing’s very uselessness is what helps me see the process and how I’ve changed, now that I’ve climbed up the steep side of a boulder that one can gently walk up around the back.
The process includes interesting human interaction with old friends and new, inspiration, motivation, training, beautiful places, solitude, fear, hard effort, pain, laughing, doubt, confidence, frustration, injury, and finally that blissful non-thinking where you’re just floating along doing those moves. Climbing highlights and directs a process of self-improvement. Through this, I may now be able to remember to unload the washing machine before our clothes go mouldy.
Happy fall, everyone.
