I recently read this book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and it is hands down the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It’s disguised as a time-management book, but really it’s a beautifully written survey of how we live our lives and how utterly backwards our thinking is about time in general.
I found myself putting the book down every few pages to really digest what he was saying because it’s so profound. It’s helped me understand that how I’ve been going about life–and how we’re taught to go about life from the time we’re born–is a large cause of our anxieties and pain.
This is a quote from the book taken from another philosopher, Alan Watts, which I think is really apt:
“Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade…. In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out in the business world… [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.”
I mean… It’s SO TRUE.
What do I do with my days? I write out lists of things with the heading “To Do” and I rush from one thing to the next thing, making sure to tick off accomplishment after accomplishment so I feel like I’ve DONE something with my day.
With all of my day. And I don’t LIKE doing these things a lot of the time.
I don’t like going to the grocery store or cleaning my house or creating sales pages or cooking dinner. I think to myself, ‘I could be doing something SO MUCH MORE important or more meaningful with this time.’ Because that’s what I’ve been taught my whole life: that the next thing is the more important thing. That the other thing is much better than what you’re doing right now. Never that what you’re doing now is the most meaningful thing you could be doing.
And so I spend a lot of my time either begrudgingly doing the thing I’m doing or anxiously anticipating the next thing I have laid out for myself to do.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Most people are not Zen masters who engage in every present moment with a clear mind and an open heart. We’re humans who’ve been taught to rush around proving our worth to society and to ourselves. Most people think they “should” be doing more–accomplishing more tangible things–than they currently are. And most people are stressed about this shortcoming.
We apply the same flawed life management system to rock climbing.
We start climbing, we go from V0 to V2 in a few months and we are PSYCHED. We’ve accomplished the next grade two times in a pretty short period of time. We’ve graduated from kindergarten to 2nd grade omg! But somewhere along the line our progress starts to slow down a bit and the check marks on our to-do list become rarer and rarer. We are not accomplishing what we’ve set out to accomplish, which is what?
To be the best rock climber on the planet, obviously. Because more is better and most is best.
This is an exaggeration perhaps for some people, but we really do have very nebulous goals that we hold ourselves to in climbing. Whatever we’re accomplishing is usually not enough for our egos… Or we have these arbitrary goal posts of what IS enough. Maybe it’s 5.11a, maybe V5, maybe 14a (8b+), or maybe V8 would finally substantiate our induction into the “real climbers of the world” club. In other words, we are donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of our faces from sticks attached to our own collars.
This is all very depressing, I know. And it’s even more depressing because these are the things I’m hearing from real people in my coaching sessions: that they are wholly unsatisfied and pretty unhappy with climbing at the moment. That the joy has been sucked away from climbing because they think they “should’ be sending harder things and doing it more quickly and more fearlessly, but they aren’t.
So what’s the good news then?
The good news is there is a different way to be and to approach climbing that’s right at our fingertips whenever we want to reach out and grab it. I’ve been doing it myself lately and I can’t believe how simple it is: Just choose to be in the moment without expectations for the future. Haha that’s SO trite! It’s so cliche! And yet it’s SO true and so simple. It’s just really hard to CHOOSE to do it. Here’s how it’s been working for me.
Instead of thinking to myself, ‘Great, now I have to do the dishes… again (sigh),’ I’ve been catching myself in that familiar cycle of victimization and drudgery and thinking instead… ‘I get to watch the kitchen go from gross and cluttered to clean and sparkly, and I get to listen to an audiobook while I do it.’ And then I take some deep breaths and calmly do the dishes without rushing through it. I enjoy it a lot more and I’m not thinking about all the other things I should be doing instead.
I do the same with my computer work, my dog walks, even the writing of this email. I think, ‘I don’t have to write this email – I get to write this email and express myself in a super creative, deep way to people who will really understand what I’m saying.’ I have chosen to do this activity right now and therefore there is nothing else for me to be doing–or to want to be doing. It’s as simple as that.
The same goes for climbing.
You are doing what you are capable of doing in this moment and there is nothing more to it than that. Your physical body, your schedule, your other life stressors, your fear levels, and your athletic gifts have put you squarely where you are in your climbing. There’s nothing to judge – it just is the way that it is.
Yes, you can try to change that so you can climb harder grades faster and more fearlessly, but there’s no use in judging yourself while you try. It only causes shame, embarassment, and a futile sense that it’s not even worth trying. If we stop valuing the next best thing–higher grades, a more “respectable” project, etc–as the direct path to our future happiness (which it has never been before, so why would it be this time?), then we can stop judging ourselves for our current reality.
Do you know what I mean? Let me give you an example.
Yesterday, I tried a 5.12 at the gym. I usually onsight 5.12’s in the gym these days, so if I had let myself have expectations, I would have expected to onsight it. I did not. I got stuck. I wanted to do a move statically and couldn’t reach it and couldn’t figure out how to propel my body up without a higher foot. So I took. I could’ve gotten really upset with myself for not having accomplished the ultimate accomplishment in climbing, onsighting something. And in the past I might have.
But instead, I played around with the move and realized I just needed to bear down on the hold so I could jump up to the next hold, rather than trying to do it with an open hand grip. I got to the top and felt a familiar sense of disappointment rush over me out of habit. ‘I should have onsighted that.’
‘What is wrong with me?’
But my new goal in climbing is simply to learn how to try harder and have zero expectations of myself, except to try as hard as I can in the moment. So I took a breath, remembered my new goal and thought about how I could look at this situation differently without the “should” playing any role at all. So I said to myself, ‘I didn’t try as hard as I could. I wanted it to be easy and it wasn’t, so I gave up. That is the learning here. I just needed to bear down on that hold and commit to jumping–aka trying harder–and now I know on an even deeper level that it’s possible to do that. There is no shame in learning and there is nothing wrong with me.’
And then I honestly felt excited about the fact that I’d just added more mastery to my climbing, instead of wasting the moment on self-deprecating thoughts. The rest of my session went really similarly and I had a ton of fun. I’m simply being in the moment with no attachment to accomplishments or the next big thing in my climbing.
And you can, too.
Work with Me on Your Mindset
If you want to work on your “should’s” and your self-talk in climbing so that you can have more fun and feel more deep satisfaction with this all-consuming hobby, let’s talk. I’m taking new mindset coaching clients right now, and I would LOVE to help you sort through why you’re feeling the way you are and figure out the steps to take to get you to a better place with your climbing.
I’m looking for deep, long-term relationships with clients who want to work on their climbing, but also to improve satisfaction levels in other areas of their lives.
I will help you understand why you feel the way you do, uncover what is most important to you at your core, and help you build your life around that, instead of what you think you “should” be doing. Book a session with me and let’s get started:
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