Trying New Things

The ups and downs of climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome

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Base of the infamous Half Dome cables

“We have your location. Stay where you are and we’ll send someone out there,” the 9-1-1 operator advised me.

“OK, great,” I rasped.

The operator continued, “We’ll call you within an hour to let you know when the rangers will be on their way.”

“But my battery’s about to die,” I replied. No response. I checked my phone and realized the call had dropped. No signal. 6% battery life remaining. “Shit,” I said.

I slipped the phone into my fanny pack and sucked the last few drops out of my water bottle.

I had just spent the morning hiking to the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome, only to take a wrong turn on the way back down. Now I was lost and exhausted with no water, an almost dead phone, and only a few hours of daylight left.

I looked downhill. The trees were so densely packed together, I could barely tell where one ended and the next began. I looked uphill and saw a streak where I had slipped and slid on my butt down an almost vertical slope.

If I stayed where I was, even if my battery was still working, I might not have a strong enough signal to receive a call back. If I moved, the park rangers would have the wrong coordinates. I took the operator’s advice and stayed put.

I activated my phone screen. 4%. What the hell?

The sun began to disappear.

My dry throat made it hard to swallow. I pulled a hard candy out of my pack and let it dissolve in my mouth so I could salivate. It helped but not much.

I checked my phone again. 2%.

I sat on the ground and leaned my back against a huge log, then took some deep breaths. I just needed to be patient. Meditate. Be one with nature.

The sun soon disappeared and I could barely make out shapes in the moonlight. I was afraid food would attract wildlife, but I was also famished. With great care, I unwrapped and ate a snack bar, then stuffed the wrapper in my pack.

I checked my phone once more. It was dead.

I curled up on my side next to the log and used my pack as a pillow. Just as I was beginning to relax, I heard a rustling in the bushes nearby. I pressed my body against the log and tried to lie perfectly still. I waited.

This was not the adventure I planned for.

My Half Dome hike was supposed to be one of the highlights of my life. For the better part of a decade, I had fantasized about making that climb, but concerns about my physical and mental readiness had held me back from turning that fantasy into a reality.

Finally, in 2018, I vowed that would be the year I would make it happen. After multiple lottery entries, I won one of the limited, daily passes required to participate in the final stretch of the ascent. I recruited some friends and booked my lodging well in advance. I went on increasingly challenging hikes and hit the gym regularly. This not only helped me build endurance but also upper-body strength. I’d need this for the last part of the climb, where I would have to pull myself upward, hand over hand, using a metal cable anchored to the steep, slippery rock face. I watched videos of the journey, especially the cable portion. I purchased a Half Dome hiking guide book. I bought and tested all of the gear the book recommended. I even corresponded with the book’s author and got more advice.

I felt like I had done more work to plan for this trip than any prior event.

When the day of the climb came, I was ready. My friends and I woke up around 5 a.m., used our flashlights to help us locate the start of the trail, and began our ascent. My friends hadn’t acquired passes so they couldn’t accompany me the entire way. We parted ways with the expectation that I’d meet them back at our cabin that evening. For the next several hours, I was on my own.

I made it to the “sub dome,” the point where a ranger was stationed to check my pass, right on schedule. I still had enough water to make it up and down the cables, after which I planned to refill at a nearby stream I had read about in the guide book. When I got to the cables, I saw several groups of people sitting at the base. I learned that some of them had decided not to go any farther, but I couldn’t imagine coming this far only to stop just short of the top. I rested a few minutes to collect myself, then pushed ahead.

The cable climb might have been the most strenuous, sustained activity of my life, but I made it. When I got to the top, I walked around, taking in the panoramic view of the Yosemite Valley and pausing to wipe away the tears of joy that blurred my vision.

I probably spent a good twenty minutes up there, then descended the cables and used my new hiking poles to navigate the slippery rocks beneath.

Just beyond the base of the sub dome, my journey began to take a dark turn. I encountered another ranger who asked to see my pass. I asked her about the water source I had read about. She said she didn’t recommend it: there was barely a trickle of water there and it was filthy from human waste. I asked her where the next closest water source was. “About 3 miles down,” she replied. As if this wasn’t frustrating enough, I then noticed something tickling my leg. I reached into my pocket and discovered my phone had been vibrating for god-knows-how-long due to a timer that I had inadvertently set (hence the low battery).

I thanked the ranger for her advice, braced myself for 3 miles with a low water supply, and continued down a path that I later realized–too late–was not the actual trail.

Lost and found

Sometime during the night, I finally heard a voice calling my name. After over an hour of shouting back and forth, the same two rangers I had encountered earlier emerged from the dense woods below and came to my rescue. I was tired, thirsty, and frightened; but I was otherwise more or less OK. They gave me food, water, and electrolyte powder and contacted dispatch to inform my friends that I had been found. The rangers sat and chatted with me for about an hour while I regained my strength. Then, using their GPS to point the way, we hacked a path through the brush for close to two hours until we reached their campsite, where I crashed for the night.

The next morning, I thanked them and I completed my descent alone. It was a beautiful day, and I took my time. At one point as I was crossing a bridge that passed over a small stream, I saw a mountain lion cub down below. I was mesmerized, but I wasn’t afraid. We made eye contact for a moment. Then it leapt across the stream and we continued in opposite directions.

Each time I saw a person coming towards me, I said “hello.” Some of them returned the greeting. Some stared at me; they probably recognized the surge of emotion I was feeling.

Finally, I reached my cabin. I knocked on the door. A few seconds later, it opened and I saw my friend standing there. I gave him a weak smile fueled by a mixture of gratitude, relief, and shame.

Experience plus reflection . . .

I’m obviously a huge advocate for trying new things. But any time you venture into the unknown, you’re taking a risk. Here are some tips I can offer based on what I’ve learned.

Plan ahead. Although you can’t plan for everything, if you do your homework, you’ll feel more prepared and confident. This was my strongest area: by training my body, reading, watching video footage, getting expert advice, and gathering the right equipment, I felt ready to face the challenge.

Examine yourself. What are your weaknesses and how can you address them? I know I’m introverted; how can I overcome this so I’m able to ask other hikers if I can join their group for a while? I know I have a bad sense of direction; what could I have done to help prevent myself from getting disoriented? (For example, every once in a while, I could have turned around and taken a picture so I’d know what to look for on the way back.)

Be present. As I revealed in my previous post on ignoring my goals, I tend to focus too much on the destination and not enough on the journey. In this case, I was so intent on getting to the top–and then back to the bottom–that I was very rarely fully engaged in the present moment. Had I been more present, I might have paused to study my surroundings, made sure I was on the right path before I went too far, and noticed my vibrating phone sooner.

Celebrate the effort. When I reflect upon my Half Dome experience, I tend to focus more on what went wrong than on what I achieved. When I started writing this post, I intended to use my mistakes as a “learning experience” I could share with my readers. But that alone doesn’t do me justice. It took a lot of hard work, both before and during my hike, to complete it. I made it! And even though the overall trip didn’t go as planned, I’m proud of myself for doing it.

Have you ever attempted one of your big “bucket list” experiences, only to find it didn’t turn out as you’d hoped? What did you learn from that experience? 

Or if you have something left to do on your bucket list, what obstacles might you face in achieving it? What can you do to overcome those obstacles?

My new year’s resolution: don’t worry about goals

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In my first post, “A letter to my pre-COVID-19 self,” I wrote about many of the commitments I’ve taken on since I began my “shelter-in-place” experience in March 2020. Every day is different: I might explore career opportunities, take a Spanish lesson, practice an aikido technique, or work on a story to share with my writing group.

But after many months of living this new, more diverse lifestyle; instead of feeling fulfilled, I started to become impatient. I’d love to find my dream job or become fluent in Spanish or earn my next aikido belt or publish a novel. But because I was spread so thin, it felt like it would take forever to fulfill any of these dreams.

When I discussed this struggle with people, one common response I got was, “Brad, you’re doing too much. If you want to accomplish your goals, you need to decide what’s a priority.”

This makes sense in theory, but whenever I try to narrow my focus, I stress over all the areas I’m neglecting. I could, for instance, decide that writing a novel is the most important thing to me and commit several hours every day to that purpose. But it wouldn’t take long before I felt like my relationships, my physical and mental health, and other parts of my life were suffering as a result.

This conundrum led me to start the new year with a question: “How can I invest in all of the dimensions of my life that are important to me and still feel like I’m doing ‘enough’ in each area?”

I believe part of the answer is to focus less on goals and learn to enjoy the present moment.

How thinking ahead holds me back

Buddhist monk and author, Thich Nhat Hanh, has helped me learn to focus less on the outcome of an action and more on the act itself. He perfectly illustrates this in his passage on the difference between “washing the dishes to have clean dishes” and “washing the dishes to wash the dishes”:

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future–and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation. Beacon Press, 1975, 1976.

After I read this, I became more conscious of how I wash the dishes. It’s amazing how hard it is for me to stay in the moment. My mind wants to get the process over with so I can move on to other things. I become anxious, hunch over the sink, scrub furiously and often end up splashing water all over the counter and myself. That’s assuming I do the dishes at all–when I treat this experience as a chore, it’s very easy to just put it off.

But when I allow myself to be in the moment, to focus on one piece at a time, on how I breathe and position my body and hold the item as I wash and rinse and dry it, it becomes a much more pleasurable experience. I feel relaxed, I’m more thorough, and I have less cleanup to do afterward.

I’ve begun to explore how I can apply the idea of “washing the dishes to wash the dishes” in my other activities.

Walk to walk, not to get somewhere

When I go for a walk, I tend to be in a rush to get to my destination. I feel like there’s a motor inside of me, driving me to walk faster. If I don’t know the way, I look at the turn-by-turn directions on my GPS and just focus on street signs, not my surroundings. (This might explain why I have terrible navigation skills: I don’t get visual cues from scenery and landmarks because I don’t pay attention to them. I plan to explore this in a future post.) By the time I get home, my feet are aching and I’m exhausted.

Now I try to walk just to walk. I’ve made a conscious effort to slow down. With each step, I try to be aware of my posture, relax my shoulders, and feel every part of my foot making contact with the ground. Sometimes my mind wanders and my pace quickens, but I catch myself and slow down again.

I also look around more. I recently moved to a new neighborhood. On my usual route, I glance at a window covered in brown paper; a sad reminder that one of my favorite local restaurants is gone for good because of COVID-19. But the other day, as I approached this scene, I did something miraculous: I turned my head. There were two other restaurants right next to this one. I took a 2-minute detour to check them out. Both were open and looked delicious.

I still made it to my destination, perhaps a few minutes later than normal, but my feet felt fine and my spirits were lifted by the idea of having two new places to try.

The one-item to-do list

I try to keep weekly and daily to-do lists. I’m pretty good about writing down tasks every day. I’m not so good at completing them. Each morning, I record everything I intend to finish that day. Then I feel an enormous sense of pressure. Where do I start? How much time can I afford to spend on each activity and get them all done? What happens if other things come up that are more urgent?

Most days, I end up completing fewer than half my tasks. I see all the unchecked boxes and feel like I failed. Then I add those items to the next day’s plan along with whatever else I “need” to get done, and the cycle repeats. I get more frustrated as more tasks are left unfinished, and I question why I should even bother tracking my to-do’s.

For the past week or so, though, I’ve changed my approach. Each day, after I review my calendar, I scan my weekly to-do list and pick the one thing I want to work on right now. I don’t get impatient about moving on to the next task because there is no next task.

When I focus on what I’m doing rather than what’s left to do, it’s much easier for me to enjoy myself. But I also find that when I don’t worry about how productive I am, I become more productive. The joy of staying in the moment energizes me to keep going. And because of this, every day I follow the practice of the “one-item to-do list,” I get a lot more done.

Learning: focus on what I know, not what I don’t know

I meet online with a Spanish tutor a couple of times a week. For some of our lessons, he sends me a link to an article in Spanish. Before I look at the text, he asks me to listen to an audio recording of the article and try to explain what I heard.

I tend to get very frustrated with myself during this part of the lesson. I quickly encounter a word I don’t understand. Then part of my brain gets stuck on this word while another part tries to keep listening. The more words I get stuck on, the harder it is to pay attention. By the end of the article, I feel lost and defeated. I wonder how I’m ever going to be able to carry on a real conversation when my listening skills and comprehension are so weak.

However, the last time my tutor shared one of these articles, I decided to stay in the moment. If I didn’t understand something, I let it go. Sometimes I could figure it out in context. Sometimes I just accepted that I didn’t get it, knowing I could ask questions later. I just tried to relax, listen, and appreciate what I could understand.

When the time came to recount what I’d heard, to my amazement, I was able to paraphrase more than half of the article and we spent most of the rest of the lesson discussing our thoughts on the topic.

Goals: Set them and forget them

I’m not suggesting that having goals is bad. It’s great to strive to do more for yourself and for others. But we can’t control the future. Not everything will work out as we envisioned, many goals will take longer to achieve than we expected, and there are many others we’ll never reach.

Whether I’m walking somewhere, planning my day, or learning a new skill; when all I care about is getting to the end, every step feels exhausting.

But when I choose to let go of the future and instead live in the present, I feel more at peace and can actually begin to enjoy myself. And from what I’ve seen so far, the more I learn to enjoy the journey, the more likely it is I’ll get to my destination.

Is there something you want in your life that you’re struggling to obtain? Do you spend time on activities you wish you could enjoy more? How might it change your experience if you let go of the goal and just focused on the experience?

A letter to my pre-COVID-19 self

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Hey, Brad.

I know you’re struggling right now.

You moved to a new city, leaving your friends and family behind. You took a job where’s it’s been tough to build friendships outside of work, then started working from home when you got the chance. You found that going to the grocery store made you anxious, so now you get groceries delivered to your home. You tried to build a workout habit at your local gym, but the other patrons made it hard for you to focus and you stopped going. You signed up for an aikido class, but after a couple of months, you showed up less and less often.

In short, you’ve created a life that revolves around staying home.

And the longer you stay at home, the harder it gets to leave. Your job has become the only thing that gives your day any structure and your reason for getting up in the morning. But when you’re done with work, you agonize over all the other things you “should” be doing.

You should go to the office for some human contact. You should be looking for other social activities. You should write more. You should get more exercise. You should build your professional skills. You should consider professional help if you can’t figure things out on your own.

As your former therapist liked to say, you’re “shoulding” all over yourself. This does nothing but overwhelm you with guilt and anxiety. Then you try to numb yourself by watching YouTube clips, playing video games, and taking naps. Before you know it, it’s nighttime and you’ve done nothing for yourself. Now you feel even worse.

As each day like this piles up, the weight gets heavier and your outlook grimmer.

My life is much different now.

I still work from home. I still have my groceries delivered. I still don’t get out much.

Yet I’m happier than I’ve been in over a year, and possibly more productive than I’ve been since college.

I meet with friends and family at least once a week. I went to my first family reunion in 20 years. I rejoined my old writing group, rebooted my blog, and wrote a short story for publication. I’m working out three times a week. I attend aikido classes regularly unless I’m not feeling well, and I even took part in a weekend retreat with over 100 students from around the world. I’m working with a coach to help me make more use of my anthropology degree in my career. I’m volunteering for small nonprofits. I’m even working with a Spanish tutor twice a week.

I’m also getting counseling again and this time around, I’m actually applying the advice I get. It’s doing wonders for me.

How was I able to make all of these changes in such a short time?

You’re not going to believe this, but it started with a pandemic.

A virus called COVID-19 was initially discovered in China at the end of 2019. It quickly spread and became a global catastrophe. By mid-March, U.S. cities started mandating that people stay at home, only leave for essentials, and wear protective masks whenever they leave. As of this letter, there have been more than 20,000,000 confirmed cases (5,000,000+ in the U.S. alone) and more than 780,000 deaths (170,000+ in the U.S.).

At the same time, the economy has taken a massive hit, homelessness and unemployment are on the rise, businesses are closing permanently (even your favorite, Beachwood BBQ!), and many kids aren’t able to get a proper education.

The future is very difficult to predict: whether and how people protect themselves varies depending on where they and their political leaders stand on staying home versus going back to work and school.

I’m not trying to downplay the devastation that this pandemic has caused. But in terms of how it’s affected my day-to-day life, other than avoiding travel and having to wear a mask when I go out, the biggest difference is how I perceive my situation.

As you’re reading this, you associate staying at home with avoiding all of the things you think you should be doing.

But today, I stay at home to avoid getting myself and the people around me sick. I no longer feel guilty about staying home, and that frees me to come up with ways to make the most of my circumstances.

You avoid “meeting” with people via webcam because it doesn’t feel human enough. Now, I can see my family and friends, take classes, and make appointments as often as I want to.

You think working out at home isn’t worth it because you don’t have room for proper equipment. Now I’m getting into shape using my own body weight plus a couple of pieces of lightweight gear.

You put off getting counseling because you have a history of getting advice and not applying it. Now, the counseling I’ve received has helped my mental health recover to the point where I’m doing more than I imagined possible.

Here are some lessons I’m passing along to you:

  1. Give yourself permission to stay at home. You’re not hurting anyone else, so why beat yourself up? In general, if you think you have a negative behavior, try asking yourself what would happen if you just embraced it. Maybe you can use it to your advantage.
  2. If you want to change something about yourself, start small. Find an option with a low barrier to entry–like a webcam conversation or an at-home workout–and start there. Once you get a taste of how easy it can be to take charge of one area of your life, you’ll want to do the same for other areas. Trust me. I’ve been there.
  3. Get help. You can’t fix everything at once, but you know what your biggest hurdles are right now, and you need to get out of your own head.

Your friend from the future,

Brad