I originally wrote this post during the Baltimore riots in April 2015 and posted it to Facebook. I’m reproducing it here because it’s a topic that is so important to me. I would even go so far to call it a manifesto on my intention for approaching challenges and conflict in life.

The events in Baltimore, and the subsequent social media hullabaloo, have got my heart and stomach twisted in knots. I’m sitting up here in Connecticut, so far from my family and friends in Baltimore, on pins and needles. I love you all, and I’m nervous for you and for my city, and I’m feeling a lot of pain. I’m scouring the internet for news and scrolling through Facebook in horror. I’m texting my sister. Her block is on fire, but she is OK. I’m thinking about empathy and vulnerability and how violence got us here, how violence has erupted in our streets, how violence shines through in the dehumanizing words of so many wealthy Baltimoreans that condemn the riots, and how even the rhetoric of nonviolence can be wielded like a weapon.

There is a lot of violence in Baltimore tonight.

I thought I would write a bit about true nonviolence, and where I am coming from when I say that it could heal our old wounds that bleed fresh with each eruption of anger.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Jesus, the protesters in Tiananmen Square, and the millions of advocates of nonviolence across the world have a lot of differences. Their religion, their spirituality or lack thereof, and their specific cause all vary widely. I come from a spiritual background of Christianity, as you all know, not entirely unlike Dr. King. My current seeking has led me to read widely across religions and traditions, seeking common truths. I have found that the concept of nonviolence crops up in every faith, at the very core of it, and so I have been looking to explore it more deeply in my own life.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, ahimsa, translated in the negative as non-harm or nonviolence, is a spiritual concept that extends much more deeply than the mere lack of physical altercations. It is also translated, in the positive, as compassion. Compassion, in this tradition, is about stripping away ego and seeing the light of God – and ourselves – in all beings.

This is not unlike Jesus’ direction in Matthew 22:39 to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is not unlike Jesus’ assertion in Matthew 25:40, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

So what I find is that this is hardest to practice in moments of provocation, when I want to shut down and defend my vulnerability. But I also find that the key to preventing damage and in fact building a relationship up in strength is the ability to open up to the possibility that what I am facing from the other person is a reflection of myself. If one can find empathy for one’s adversary in that moment, it is possible to find a courageous, empathetic solution to the problem – even if that involves challenging that other person to do better.

In Matthew 5:44, Jesus said, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

In Buddhism, this is referred to as the way of the bodhisattva – the warrior of compassion.

It is easier to dehumanize, to otherize, to alienate, when we feel threatened or attacked. We use violent, demeaning, objectifying language, like “savage,” “thug,” “animal,” “piece of shit,” “pig.” This language lays the groundwork for physical violence. It is harder to practice compassion when we feel pain, threat, and attack. But that is the heart of faith, whatever religion you may practice. If we do not have a faith, secular humanism and the psychological needs of the human mind still guide us toward empathy. And that is where we find love for our adversaries.

It is interesting that in all these religions, there is a history of the tremendous violence of war. Some find this to be a contradiction in terms, but typically you will find that the love and compassion that is counseled in these instances in mostly inwardly-focused. It does not typically mean that you do not defend yourself against attack – just that in your defense, you refrain from anger and hate towards your adversary. Pray for your adversary – see them as your brother – but that does not mean you allow them to harm you. It is harder to overreact, harder to take a life, and harder to cause harm, when you see yourself and your family reflected back in your attacker. It might actually hurt to fight back, even as it is necessary. That is why a bodhisattva is called a warrior – because this practice opens us up in vulnerability to experiencing physical and psychic pain.

Jesus’ actions of physical destruction when he upended the tables of the vendors in the temple were based in compassion, recognizing that a challenge was necessary to gain the attention of folks whose “business as usual” was an affront to God. Just as the actions of the Freedom Riders’ sit-ins were a challenge to the “business as usual” of Southern segregation.

So I do not say that this means the riots nor the response of the police was justified. It is hard to know who is right, since I was not there and I never know what is in someone’s mind. But I can say that in our reaction of pain and threat, in this situation, we have a choice – to act out in our anger, whether that is directed at the police and society that we feel threatens us or if that is directed at the rioters that we feel threaten us, or to engage with compassion. Perhaps we are insistent in refusing to allow harm to come to us and our children, and we keep our voices loud, but we do not reduce police to “pigs” or rioters to “animals.”

I have been angry, in my life. I have wanted to destroy things. I think this is because I am human, and I have experienced unfairness and injustice. And so I am a rioter.

I have been overwhelmed with fear and the desire to protect my family and livelihood, in my life. I have overreacted to perceived threats. I think this is because I am human, and a family member. And so I am the Baltimore Police.

But what does it mean to engage with compassion? Does it mean that we do not hold people accountable for their actions, or defend ourselves against violence? Absolutely not, but we do need to recognize that our judgment should come from empathy, not from hate and anger. It means we seek to truly put ourselves in the shoes of the people in the midst of the struggle, and try to understand the challenges they face. It means – and this is perhaps the hardest part – that we allow others to hold us accountable, where we engage in or are complicit in violence. There is a place to look at the data, to formulate grand theories about life and societal structure, but those really don’t mean anything if they discount the lived experience of the people on the ground. What deep need is triggering our reactions? What can we do, on a personal level, to understand the struggle of others and to get at the root of the problems they face?

I truly believe that the only way forward is compassion. We will debate the statistics and analysis, the pundits and the activists and the politicians will face off, and we will see endless furor nationally. But if we can just keep coming back to this core of empathy, we will find a solution and a way forward.

If you know me, you probably know that I am a bit of a skeptic (maybe more than a bit), and I require hard evidence to buy into a given theory. You might wonder where the hell all this mushy feelings nonsense is coming from. I do have some strong opinions on the numbers, the evidence, and the underlying reasons for what is happening in Baltimore tonight, but I do not feel it is right to stop there and yell about how right I think I am. We are dealing with people, not just numbers. So when we argue and debate, we have to remember who we are talking to. We have to remember that we don’t know everything, and that it’s worth trying to understand more perspectives than just our own. If we have faith, this is where it counts. We can’t just put it on hold when tough situations come up. This is where, in fact, it counts the most.

Do I leave my phone on and by my bed so that my sleep can be interrupted by text messages and phone calls? What if they’re urgent, though? What if something happens and my family needs me?

When presenting slides at work, can Facebook notifications interrupt my presentation?

When watching Jessica Jones, should I silence my cell phone? Maybe only if I’m watching with other people? Can cooking dinner be interrupted by a toddler’s dirty diaper? Do I stop my shower if my phone rings? Should I stop playing with my son if my husband calls?

How about reading, writing, meditating, praying? What if someone calls me then? Should I answer? Should it matter who it is? Only starred contacts? Only immediate family members?

What do I allow to be interrupted, and what does that say about what I care about? Who I care about? What does it say about my own distractibility and attention span?

Honestly, these aren’t questions I spend a lot of time thinking about, other than to feel brief annoyance when I have to stop doing something I like because someone wants my attention for themselves. Some of them are easy – of course I turn off my Facebook notifications and all interruptions during a presentation. OF COURSE.

So why isn’t some of the other stuff so obvious?

I’d love it if I had uninterrupted blocks of 3-4 hours at a time to do something. ONE THING. Minimum 3-4 hours sounds perfect. Probably ideally 6 hours, since we’re dreaming. But this is not the world I live in. Since I have work and a husband and a kid and friends and this family has to eat and I guess bathe from time to time and then there’s that other stuff I like to do, “hobbies” they’re called, what do I do about the yawning gap between my ideal life and reality? How do I make decisions about my time?

DO I make decisions about my time? Can I? Or must I be swept up in the wave of distractions and interruptions that constitutes everything I care about in the world?

 

• Delay gratification. Also, don’t wait to be happy.
• People’s differences are small and unimportant. They are also very important.
• I’m the only person I have to please. Also, doing things for other people is the key to happiness.
• Sometimes resistance indicates that you should stop doing a thing. Sometimes you must fight through resistance in order to do something important.
• Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear. Also, you must take some things on faith.
• You are good enough. And there is always room for improvement.

 

“The opposite of a profound statement is also true.” -Gretchen Rubin

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about the places I’ve lived. I move a lot – always have, ever since I left home for college – and now that I have a toddler and a new baby on the way, I’m thinking about what it would mean to settle down. To really. Settle. Down.

One of the things it means is embracing a place. It means becoming entangled in that place in a way that I haven’t been since I lived with my parents. Places have character, soul, even in today’s increasingly homogenized and globalized world. You can’t take the Puritan out of Connecticut. You can’t take the aristocracy out of the Deep South. Appalachia remains rugged, self-sufficient, and independent. In DC, power is critical and yet inaccessible. While those things are small snippets of the soul of these places, they are there, and they do matter, surprisingly enough.

For the past 11 – almost 12! – years, the average time I have lived in an apartment is probably a bit less than a year. The longest time so far has been about 18 months. I think we might hit 2 years in our current apartment.

The brevity of time I’ve spent in these places has prevented me from really putting down roots anywhere, at least as a fully independent adult. It has also allowed me a comparative look into the souls of these places. You can’t get that in a week’s vacation. A few months in, you begin to feel its character and sense the pattern behind the bustle of everyday life. By a year, the soul has revealed itself, made itself apparent. Then, I get to move and learn about a new place.

The apartment I live in now, quite apart from closing in on the distinction as the longest place I’ve lived in 12 years, is also the biggest place yet, with two roomy bedrooms sporting walk-in closets and a nice long entryway that I’ve hung with pictures and trinkets. It has been quite nice to live in a place where we are close to a network of support – my husband’s family – but still get to make up our own little space, hideout, and routine, with plenty of breathing room. Still, nearing 30, I begin to long for a backyard to grow a garden with perennials and vegetables, a fire pit for fresh, early-fall evenings, a big kitchen to dry herbs, a garage with a workshop so I can engage in some fickle dabbling in woodworking and fixing things, according to the dictates of my tyrannical whimsy.

So now we consider: where will we set down roots? Where will my sons come of age? With what place, with what great and flickering soul of a place, will we enter into this sacred compact?

Perhaps I’m being a bit melodramatic. But to me, this feels just that important. Because this is something different from my habit. I specialize in a year-long character study, living in an apartment and scoping out the wildlife at nearby coffee houses and church basements. This, though…this is a commitment. It’s like getting married.

It’s a privilege to be able to choose, of course, just as it’s a privilege to have chosen my own husband or to have birthed a kid. I think that makes its weight heavier, not lighter. And just as getting married or having kids means letting go of one life in exchange for another, this decision, regardless of where we choose to go, is as deeply sad as it is exciting and important. I must let go of the possibility inherent in every other place-soul and commit to just one. It’s no more or less than any of us do, and it is full of hope and potential, but I feel the loss of my nomadic ways nonetheless.

And so I will be both joyful and sad, if and when I enter into this compact. It is no more or less than any of us can ever really be, when you think about it.

“‘If you’ve been assigned to me, I suppose you must be some kind of a Namer, too, even if a primitive one.’

‘A what?’

‘A Namer. For instance, the last time I was with a Teacher – or at school, as you call it – my assignment was to memorize the names of the stars.’

‘Which stars?’

‘All of them.’

‘You mean all the stars, in all the galaxies?’

‘Yes. If he calls for one of them, someone has to know which one he means. Anyhow, they like it; there aren’t many who know them all by name, and if your name isn’t known, then it’s a very lonely feeling….’

‘Well then, if I’m a Namer, what does that mean? What does a Namer do?’

…‘When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job. Maybe you’re supposed to make earthlings feel more human.’”

–A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle

 

What kind of respect should we have for words?

I’ll tell you what I see. Most people don’t even know what to do with words. They don’t recognize their power. They try to shrug off the most powerful tool in the world today – “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Never have I heard such a line of nonsense as that. Nothing is stronger than words, wielded properly.

How else does government work? How do laws? Why is free speech so important, anyway? What happens when everyone changes their mind and begins to use different words? Fifty years ago, gay marriage was inconceivable and impossible. If you died before last year, it was an unreality. But today, in this country, it is real. And nothing physical in the world changed. All imagined structures, conceived and articulated with words.

What is marriage, after all? What creates it? What dissolves it?

What gives us the right to vote? What kept black men and women, and all women, for so long, from that right? Laws, adopted and written with assorted “yeas” and “nays.” Lawmakers persuaded with effectively wielded words.

If we want to protect speech, we cannot discount its power. Its power is nearly endless.

Naming something incorrectly or thoughtlessly is technically a semantic error. But when viewed through this lens, semantics becomes something more than a dismissive hand-wave. Semantics, viewed in this way, is a church, and Naming a hallowed sacrament. As in L’Engle’s story, Naming someone or something correctly bestows enormous power and worthiness. Un-naming – a name incorrectly applied – destroys the soul.

Who gets to name a place? A person? A group of people? A type of person? Whose right is it to wield that power?

What does it mean when people disagree on a Name?

Historically, it means quite a lot. It’s more than a word, when a Name is disputed. It becomes a symbol of an entire ideology.

Only Protestants would call Northern Ireland “Ulster.” Catholics call it “the North,” “the six counties,” or “the northern counties.”

And what happens to the people and places in question, when those names are disputed?

Those places I mentioned, and the people in them, did not fare well, certainly.

All I can say is that it is a failure of epic proportions to be dismissive when discussing what we call a person, a group of people, or a place. If someone disagrees, it deserves thoughtful consideration. Why do they feel that way? What could we have missed? None of us have a complete picture of the world, and we learn from others when they tell us something that we’d never considered before. It’s one of the most valuable things we can learn from getting out into this gorgeously diverse world full of billions of perspectives. And we only get it when we give language its proper consideration.

If you want to criticize someone, use hurtful words to describe them, or sling full-on mud their way in public or private, there is no law against it. But as an adult human who chose to use those words, you’ll have to take full responsibility for them. You don’t get to shrug off the impact of those words as “not your problem,” or “the fault of a weak society.” You said it. You own it. If you call someone a name that you know they hate and makes them feel demeaned, because you think it’s important to be “honest” or “politically incorrect,” you own that impact as well, and perhaps even more importantly, you own the intention behind it. You own the missed opportunities to hear something you didn’t already know.

I’m tired of words and language being dishonored in this way. It’s recklessness, pure and simple – the birthright and everlasting call sign of the entitled.

It is not “thought policing” to expect careful consideration of words and names applied to real things. Words matter. And we should always expect our poor reasoning skills to be corrected.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1

We humans. We love to tell stories. Maybe we have to tell stories.

I love stories, especially books. I read as much as I possibly can. These days, that’s not a lot. One or two books a month, three if I’m on a roll. I used to blaze through books in one or two days, always hungry for the next. I am attempting to retain and cultivate my attention after the ravages of pregnancy and newborn care, and I may never again have the kind of time I had as a bored child devouring the entire YA and adult science fiction sections of the library.

Consuming stories fuels their creation. I used to tell stories to myself, writing Star Wars fan fiction on a computer as a 12 year old kid wishing and imagining that she could be someone else. I learned, as an older child, to tell stories out loud, to connect with people and to pull more stories out of them.

I’ve realized that I tell myself a story about myself and who I am today, and that present self is the inevitable closure of the narrative that form unbidden in my mind. In my mind, I am who I am today because I experienced these five (let’s say) critical story arcs, crucibles of personality, and personal crises. But the amount of things I’ve experienced in my life – the perceptions available to me, the interactions with others, and the emotions I’ve felt – these are countless. I will have countless more, and be changed in endless unimaginable ways. I must sort through all this data to make sense of my life so far. I do the same with my family and friends. I think I understand the Most Important Things to know about them – the things that make them comprehensible to me as people. But their versions of those Most Important Things are undoubtedly different from mine.

I think we are all telling stories, all the time, to one another and to ourselves. Our perception of current events fits into that story that we are telling ourselves, and our reaction to those events depends solely on the meaning we give them within that story. It is important to remind ourselves that our version of the story is necessarily incomplete, and it is not necessarily constructed with accurate information. When we talk with others about current events, our feelings about them, or what we think world leaders ought to do, we can experience the influence of others’ stories on our own as our opinions slightly shift, or our perspectives slightly expand to account for new facts or a new, valuable perspective. Or we may feel the need to shore up our perception against theirs, if the discussion shows us holes or inconsistencies in our stories. (If it’s any good as a conversation, that is.)

One of the reasons social media is so maddening is that it requires that a personal, verbal storytelling style – what you might use to talk to your best friend or work acquaintance about what’s happening in Syria – be paired with the open-ended proclamations and assertions of a medium written for publication. The stories that we tell ourselves about our shared lives and experiences overlap and clash with those of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Seeing our thoughts and stories in print like this does not have the softness of a conversation.  It commits us to a hardened moral judgment: my story is right.

Some argue that social media is just information, most of it useless. Maria Popova talks about this in her article on Brain Pickings, her site, called “Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers”:

“Once again echoing Walter Benjamin’s wise discrimination between storytelling and information, Sontag considers the two contrasting models ‘competing for our loyalty and attention’:

‘There is an essential … distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary.’”

Sontag argues that television presents information, fragmented by commercials and never-ending plots, while novels present stories. Popova likens this to the commercial internet today.

Certainly experiencing other people’s stories is a different experience entirely when it happens on social media or on television, disrupted as those media are by commercial interests and curtailed by limits on available time and space. But they are stories, clashing and overlapping and poorly told, in many cases, but narratives with a purpose in the telling, nonetheless. I think we as humans are incapable of presenting or receiving information without narrative. If there isn’t one there, we make one up. We process all data into stories, and we perceive a coherent plot arc where there is none. We assume that there is a shared story, but every person’s experience and perception of that story is different, because so much is happening at once.

As Sontag says (from Popova’s article),

“To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.”

I would argue that we all have the moral and ethical responsibility that Sontag bestows upon novelists: to make a choice about the stories we disseminate into the world. Words – particularly written words – are endlessly powerful. Our position in history grants us the unprecedented platform to commit our words to print before an audience of peers. If we want to write – and I assert that even a short social media post counts – we need to start with the wisdom and humility required to stretch the nets of our attention, to recognize the weighty moral judgment we are making by writing this story, and not that story. Be mindful with our attention, and be aware that we can never mind everything, all at once – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

“The work wasn’t good enough. All changed, all passed. There was no way of ensuring lasting beauty. Verily, I wrote in water and judging my work with a dreadful dispassionate vision, perhaps it was as well. I spoke to Martha Graham on the pavement outside of Schrafft’s restaurant. She bowed her head and looked burningly into my face. She spoke from a life’s effort. I went home and wrote down what she said:

‘There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open….’

‘But,’ I said, ‘when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.’

‘No artist is pleased.’

‘But then there is no satisfaction?’

‘No satisfaction whatever at any time,’ she cried passionately. ‘There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others.’”

-Agnes de Mille, from Dance to the Piper

 

It comes as a feeling of heat, a catch in the moment inside of a thought, telling me to write this down. I must remember this, I think. I will remember when I get out of the shower, or stop driving, or wake up in the morning. I think, I can’t stop now to write this down. Don’t you tell me what to do.

But I will not remember if I do not get out of bed, stop the car, jump out of the shower, start writing. If I do not write it down, it is lost forever. It is endlessly frustrating. I have spent evenings and days enslaved to these hot thoughts, writing and writing endlessly, because I had to get it out. But it is never good enough, and I never put it out into the world. Then, I have spent nights dreaming and turning restlessly, refusing to write it down, burned by the frustration of the gap between what I see in my mind’s eye and my ability to execute what I see. And these nights are just as frustrating.

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I’m at the rock climbing gym, and I have decided to climb a 5.11 route.* I know that it is too hard for me. I think about the distinctions in the grades as they were described by a seasoned 5.13 climber I met: “5.7s and 5.8s are beginner climbs. Most people can climb them within days,** once they have the hang of the movements involved. 5.9s and 5.10s are intermediate: your technique needs to be developed, and you need to have developed some finger and upper body strength. 5.11s and 5.12s are impossible: you must cling to imaginary holds and float up the wall on sheer strength of will. Harder than that? Unimaginable. You must have suction cups on your fingers.” And yet he does it, and others do it, all the time.

If he says that even good climbers think these climbs are impossible and the holds imaginary, I decide that I will just use my imagination. I will imagine, as I place my fingers on hilariously tiny ledges – touching them with half of the first pad on three fingertips on each hand, I snort incredulously – and my feet on what feel like almost imperceptible nubs of plastic, that this scant purchase is enough to hold me on the wall. It will even let me push farther up. I imagine that it is enough, and I find that I am still there, still clinging to these impossible holds, but my weight is starting to hurt my fingers. Hardly daring to breathe, I imagine that I can take one hand off and reach the next hold. I imagine that the subsequent pinching motion I must make with my thumb and first two fingers is enough to pull me to the next hold, and suddenly I am there. Again, again. I stop thinking and only feel the next and the next and the next move. I am halfway up the wall. I cannot believe it. I look around and think, “This is impossible,” and as I snap back into reality, I fall.

***

Here’s a thing: placebos work. When researchers give a control group a placebo in clinical studies, some of those people get better. More people given a placebo get better than a control group given nothing. This effect – the Placebo effect – has been thoroughly established and is not fully understood. What is a placebo? It’s nothing, but it does something. How?

A placebo makes people believe that they are taking something that will make them better. It seems that what is working is that belief itself. A general presumption among the public is that if the illness got better from nothing other than belief, it wasn’t a “real” illness to begin with; that person simply wasn’t “really” sick. But what makes an illness real? They had to have been experiencing symptoms and received a diagnosis to enter the study. But the placebo still worked – or, people are just spontaneously getting better more often with a placebo than with nothing at all. Possible, but unlikely.

I would argue, however, that it’s wrong-headed to discount the seriousness of the illness in those people; instead, we ought to look at the power the mind exerts over the physical body. More than that, we need to be clear that the mind is a part of the physical body. In our exceedingly digital and abstract society, we tend to look at the mind as the objective observer of the body and its experience, but that, in fact, is not fully possible. Not only can perception change reality within the body (as with a placebo, in some cases), but the body can also influence the mind. There are a number of hypothesis currently being researched on the role that, for example, the microbiota living in the digestive system plays in the development of mental health issues. In that way, diet may directly influence mental health. Chronic pain linked to orthopedic injury is known to be linked to depression, so much so that anti-depressants are part of the standard, accepted treatment plan for long-term pain. The acts of smiling and forced laughter are linked to noticeable improvements in mood. The mind-body connection is prolifically researched and still not fully understood, but it could be that we must move away from the idea of a mind-body connection and instead explore why we ever thought they were separate entities at all. Perhaps when a mind-body disconnect occurs, it is a prime opportunity for new pathologies to bloom and multiply.

***

A common practice in sports psychology is to counsel athletes to spend time visualizing a particular move successfully from start to finish. It’s very common in rock climbing, because often, climbers will work on a single route for dozens or even hundreds of attempts before completing the route without falling (a “send”). When the athlete visualizes the move, they are actually activating motor cortex in their brain – the same part of the brain that is activated in order to physically complete the move. Similarly, as this article by Jim Lohr in Scientific American states, “Studies have shown that the same brain regions become active when a person performs a task and when a person observes someone carrying out a task.” Watching someone else successfully complete an unfamiliar movement may allow us to complete the same movement.

As your motor cortex “learns” a movement, it becomes less conscious and more automated. This is commonly referred to as “muscle memory.” It’s what makes people better at sports and anything else they do. And it can be developed by something as simple as thinking about your move – just imagining it.

***

I am not claiming that a drug should not have to display a stronger and more predictable effect than a placebo to be considered useful. I’m a natural skeptic – or at least a trained one (as my sister and I always remind each other, our father always taught us to “Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear” and “Consider the source”). So I am not in a rush to put reactive substances into my body without good cause. Instead, I want to reframe my perspective: to honor the physicality of my thoughts and feelings, as well as the mental effects of felt physical sensations. I believe I’ve found a lot of health and strength in that mindset – even if that belief is just a placebo.

*A note on the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS): Just like standard versus metric measurements, no one uses YDS to grade climbs outside of the United States. The original Yosemite system included a range of graded inclines from 1.0 (a flat path) to 4.9 (a harder, exposed scramble – scrambles are generally now graded class II-IV, which roughly correspond to YDS grades). The 5.0 grade is more or less vertical and requires the protection of a rope in the case of a fall, but climbing anything up to 5.5 is about the difficulty of climbing a ladder. If you go to a climbing gym, you’ll start on 5.5s and 5.6s to get a grasp on the movements required in climbing.

If you’re into bouldering…well, I can’t help you, bro.

**It took me something like a year to climb a 5.8, so.