Reconciliation
- December 2009
- Hi Steph Simple Living
Steph
I have just finished reading your book, “High Infatuation”. I am not in the habit of writing to the authors of books I read (in fact, I think I’ve only done it once before), but I felt strongly moved to do so now. I suppose I can best describe why by saying I feel really privileged to have been given by you the chance to hear what you say in the book. And so I wanted to thank you for that.
You are so incredibly open in your writing – so unaffected, it seems to me, by any concern about what you should say or how you should write. Instead, it just seems to be your soul pouring out of you. And you are someone … I’m sorry but there’s no way to say this without sounding patronising or creepy or something equally undesirable … with a deep and interesting soul.
I heard of you for the first time only a couple of months ago (after a TV programme shown here in the UK about “slacklining” – I think that’s what it’s called?) led me to some related articles on the internet and from there to your website. And, naturally (and particularly for someone like me who has never climbed), the first thing was struck me was the almost unbelievable physical skill, effort and achievement in what you do …
… but your writing makes it clear that your approach to climbing – and to life – is about so much more than the physical actions themselves. That is what makes your book much more remarkable and valuable, and it’s for that aspect of it that I really want to thank you.
In particular, the philosophical dilemma or paradox that you write about in the final pages of the book is one of the most thought-provoking things I can remember reading – there can’t be many questions that go closer to the very essence of how we should try to live our lives.
I also recognise very much in myself something else you write about in those last pages – the way in which the (apparent?) certainties of youth fade into ambiguity as we get older (I’m in my early 40s now), and we’re left wondering whether those apparent certainties were simply the result of youthful naivety and that we are wiser now or whether actually those certainties were truer and that we have lost a purity we would have been better to have hung onto. As you say (and it felt so right as I read it), “Some things, the good things, really are that simple.” Perhaps, if we hang on to our strong faith in that very natural and pure instinct then we can make sense of the rest.
As for this very deep dilemma you pose about how to reconcile the concept of “surrendering to the flow” with the desire to push ourselves to achieve things we would not otherwise be able to, well it would be absurdly presumptuous of me to try to offer a resolution – it’s a question to which many wise minds have devoted considerable thought for centuries, I imagine.
And your own thinking may have moved on – I think you wrote the book two or three years ago, and I know you have done a lot more climbing since then. Have your thoughts and feelings on this changed or developed in that time, and have you written about that anywhere?
Anyway, reading your book this evening has spurred me into thinking a lot about this (and staying up much later than I’d planned on a Sunday night as a result!). And, if my thinking is remotely on a fruitful track for me, then just your initial posing of the question has been helpful to me even if you don’t have an “answer” to share now.
So, again, thank you for that. And thank you for giving so much of yourself in all of your writing in the book. Very best wishes to you in your continuing journeys, both physical and mental/emotional/spiritual. As you write, “There is no ‘there’”, but we’re all on journeys of some sort, and I wish you joy and enlightenment on yours.
Best wishes
Mark
Dear Mark,
Thanks for writing, and for such a thoughtful letter. All the things you are thinking about are definitely the questions that keep poking at me. Because with climbing there has always been this issue for me of motivation….what is the motivation to be doing these things, rather than all the other things one could do?
For a long time I felt pretty conflicted about being motivated, and that was definitely something I was struggling with a lot for the entire decade that I wrote the stories that are in High Infatuation, and also when I put them together into the book. I also feel like I am a product of my culture, and there is a deep inherent conflict between the ideas of surrendering to the flow and the pressure to “do.” This is something I have wrestled with a lot, and still do, although much less now.
Though I make a lot of mistakes and get confused a lot, when I step back, I see that faith, simplicity and instinct never seem to steer in the wrong direction. When I was young, I trusted that implicitly. Then life got weird, and I didn’t. Now I guess I have the faith back, or maybe just more confidence.
I am working on another book right now, and it’s because I have entered another phase than the one I wrote about before. In many ways, starting to base jump has taken me through another learning cycle, and it has brought me some answers about those questions of motivation, and some peace. If nothing else, the experiences of the last several years have turned the lens of my kaleidoscope, and all the bits of colored glass have shifted into new shapes which have been interesting for me to look at 🙂
Thanks again, I really appreciate your thoughts, and feel honored that my book triggered some of that contemplation.
xxSteph
