In praise of fear

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Frank Herbert

When I was a nerdy adolescent, this passage from Dune struck me as being profound enough to memorize. For the hell of it. Back when you memorized things because you didn’t have the opportunity to outsource your memory to a pocket-sized gadget. It did help me through some things when I was younger: heading off alone to university in the foreign land of Montreal, jumping out of a plane, taking my first solo glider flight. Over time, I had all but forgotten those words, until a conversation with an old (nerdy) friend dredged them up out of my memory again, amazingly intact. 

During today’s “warm-up” climb, a 6c+ (5.11c) crack trending diagonally for 35m, I find myself silently reciting these lines again. I am afraid. Why? Sure, my body is not yet quite awake and limber, and my mind has not yet discarded its petty concerns to achieve focus. But that is the same for any other warm-up climb on any other day. No, this one is still different.

It is a crack climb, which requires techniques I don’t practise very often and consequently am not good at: the unfamiliar. Some of these unfamiliar moves produce pain in my slightly injured right wrist, causing me to worry about my ability to execute the necessary moves: doubt, fear of failure. 

The route has also been climbed A LOT and the foot holds are getting polished. I see some of them glinting in the sun, feel the toe of my climbing shoe oozing slowly away from where I initially place it. Uncertainty. A ticking clock. But still, so what? The worst that can happen is that I fall. I trust the system of rope and gear; I trust Ulysse’s belaying abilities entirely. However, in my inexperience with diagonal cracks, I am sometimes inadvertently placing my foot between the rope and the wall. Should I fall like that, I will receive a nasty rope burn on my leg, or much worse, be flipped upside down, smacking my head on the rock. I rather like the contents of my head as they are, thank you very much. 

This is a legitimate reason for fear, but I am conscious of one fact above all others: the more I allow myself to fear, the more I lose focus, and the more likely it is that I will indeed fall. 

“Fear is the mind-killer.”

Halfway up the route, I badly want to call down to Ulysse to take up the slack so that I can safely hang on the rope and take a break, as much from the mental battle as from the physical. After all, my ego tells me, it’s a routine warm-up pitch. It doesn’t mean anything if I climb it cleanly or take a break. I’ve “proven” myself at this grade before.

“Fear is the little-death.”

But it isn’t a routine pitch, otherwise I wouldn’t be so scared. That realization unlocks something, and I suddenly know it is important for me to keep going.

“I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”

And I do. And I get to the top with the contents of my noggin intact, at least from outward appearances. Facing that fear set the tone for the rest of the day: a calm, respectful willingness to embrace whatever challenges came next. I ended up having a great day: happy, at peace, climbing well. Believe me, this does not happen as often as I’d like.

“Only I will remain.”

Our fears get fine-tuned with exposure. Most of us feel a lot of fear the first time we try something new, especially if it involves either using technology to overcome what could otherwise kill us, or exposing ourselves to the ridicule of our peers. Scuba diving, flying, climbing, asking someone for a date, giving a speech. The fear centre in the primitive part of our brains is not capable of performing a logical assessment of the situation before it decides whether to fear; its job is to keep us from doing stupid shit that might mangle our bodies or get us kicked out of the tribe. However, the more we repeat an experience, the more we build trust by understanding the limitations of ourselves and our technologies. The irrational part of the fear is hushed. We start to feel exhilaration at increasing our mastery over the inherently dangerous, but it is not that the danger goes away.  

Climbing offers up a cornucopia of fears, from psychological ones like the fear of failure and other embarrassments (say, having one’s scream upon taking a big fall echo throughout the canyon…this would never happen to me, ahem), to physical fears such as grievous bodily harm or, in the extreme, death. Why do we seek this? We could choose to avoid it, or at least to spend our time and money on activities that don’t make our palms sweat and send our lizard brain into paroxysms. Yet there is something ever so compelling about overcoming even minor fears like the ones I encountered this morning. It makes us acutely aware not only that life is fleeting, but also that we have some power to shape it through our choices and actions. We don’t often take time to contemplate this, caught up as we are in our busy, distracted modern existence.

“Inside every person is really two people: the person you are and the person you want to be.” 

Terry O’Reilly

Try it. Do something that you are scared of, whether it’s giving a presentation at work, signing up for a nude drawing class when you can barely draw stick figures, modeling for that nude drawing class, or doing something that causes your lizard brain to shout “We’re all gonna die!”. (Obviously, do your homework–I’m not advising you to do something reckless.) Walk in with an open mind and a willingness to learn. Maybe you’ll get tongue-tied in the presentation, maybe you’ll scream through the entire bungee jump, but that’s ok. It’s the trying and seeing it through that is important, the not giving up. You’ll get through it and you’ll gain something, and it will nudge you, even if just a little, toward that person you want to be.

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Photo credit: bernat… on Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND