by Andrew Lynn
Bachar looks every bit the Californian beach bum as he starts the climb: he’s tanned and his blond hair is worn long. But that’s where the likeness stops; no beach bum could even consider tackling the sheer face of granite that makes up this climb. Bachar’s handhold for the first half of the climb is a narrow crack in the rock: it’s along this crack that he crawls and from this crack that he swings – sometimes hanging from the rock with just one hand – to reach for the next hold. The second half of the climb is even more outrageous. The crack has gone and now it’s just the Californian up against the rock, flat like a lizard, and with nothing much between him and certain death on the valley floor below. But Bachar does make it – and with real speed and grace. It’s an astonishing performance.
Watch Bachar on the climb called Crack A Go Go and you’re left with the same sense of awe. It’s another vertical wall of granite in Yosemite threaded with narrow seams and pockets of rock upon which Bachar builds the climb. Bachar follows the seams with his fingertips, sometimes pulling on the rock horizontally for grip. It’s not reckless; he’s working the rock, feeling out each handhold as he goes. But he’s also fast – and elegant. There’s none of the hesitation you would expect given the self-evident danger of what Bachar is doing. ‘I read somewhere if you fall over fifty feet and you land flat or something, your organs . . . that’s when they start separating, tearing apart from each other inside your body. So after that I guess you have a pretty good chance of dying.’
Free soloing was not the future that anyone would have anticipated for the young Bachar. The climber’s dad, a maths professor at UCLA, had always expected that his son – a grade A student – would at the least make it through college. The young Bachar wasn’t taking: he had told himself that he was going to be the best climber in the world – and do whatever was necessary to get there. He dropped out of school in 1976 to ‘put the same effort into climbing as I was going to put into being a professor’.
Bachar’s dedication shone through what must have been difficult years. His father disavowed him for throwing it all away. (It would be many years later, when a student showed Bachar Sr. an article about the ‘great climber John Bachar’, that his father eventually came round.) Bachar’s mother did what she could for her son, sending him the $50 a month child support paid by her father.
The training was intense. Bachar immersed himself in kinesiology and sports science. He ditched his unscientific pull-up/dip programme for a more scientific regimen of one-day-on, one-day-off training. This regimen was absolute; each day was set aside for a training or rest, and Bachar made no exceptions. At his best, he could do a two-arm pull-up with 140 pounds strapped to his belt and a one-arm pull-up with 12.5 pounds.
So there’s the dedication. And there’s the training. But what makes the free soloists really special is their breathtaking nerve in the face of real danger. When you free solo, you’re not climbing a rock face that nobody else can climb; you’re climbing in a way that nobody else would dare. The free soloist is distinguished from the lesser mortal by his presence of mind. ‘I think maybe it’s confidence,’ said Bachar of those who couldn’t do it. ‘They are not confident in themselves that their body will do what their mind tells them to do every single time I think is a big part of it.’ Or, as his friend and co-climber John Long put it: ‘That perfect master thing that Bach was into which was I’m going to do this death-defying thing because I can.’ It was, he concludes, ‘a sort of quasi-mystical take on the whole thing. That was what he was into.’
* * *
Here’s the way Csíkszentmihályi presents the difference between the flow state and normal experience:
Normative Life Rock-Climbing
Informational noise; distraction and confusion of attention One-pointedness of mind
Nebulosity of limits, demands, motivations, decisions and feedbacks Clarity and manageability of limits, demands, decisions, feedbacks
Severing of action and awareness Merging of action and awareness
Hidden, unpredictable dangers; unmanageable fears Obvious danger subject to evaluation and control
Carrot-and-stick preoccupation with exotelic, extrinsic material and social rewards; orientation towards ends Process orientation; concern for autotelic, intrinsic rewards; conquest of the useless
Superficiality of concerns; thinness of meaning in the flatland Dimension of depth up there; encounter with ultimate concerns9
It’s a picture of two different worlds. There’s the world of our normative existence: that’s characterized by informational ‘noise’, a fogginess of expectations and unpredictability of danger, a ‘carrot-and-stick’ system of reward and punishment, and a pervading superficiality of concerns. The other world is one of clarity of limits, unambiguous danger, and intrinsic rewards.
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When climber John Long referred to Bachar’s ‘quasi-mystical’ take on it, he may well have been thinking about one-pointedness in Buddhist thinking. One-pointedness is about keeping your mind concentrated on the task in hand. Anything ulterior to that task is to be ruthlessly pruned away from consciousness. Thoughts of personal benefit or loss, greedy thoughts, envious thoughts, lustful thoughts – these can all crowd around any action to distract and draw the mind away from its rightful object. Our minds are in this way corrupted by various forms of desire that take us away from the immediacy of what we are doing in the current moment. By fostering within ourselves a state of ‘desirelessness’ vis-a-vis what we are doing at the present, we are better able to bring about this one-pointedness of mind. The fundamental way in which this is to be done is by suspending thought about potential consequences and by detaching the object of attention from anything beyond itself. Psychological research tells a story that is largely at one with this philosophy: shift away from an internal focus (a focus on techniques, physiological state, or emotions) towards an external focus (a focus on the task itself) and our performance outcomes are dramatically improved.10
* * *
So how could Bachar do it without counterproductively striving for control of each movement? How could he look into the void, so to speak, without blinking?
To pull off free soloing Bachar-style was not just to make the climb; it was to make the climb with panache. ‘Well, I don’t know, climbing I think is about style as much as it getting to the summit. So anybody – a telephone repairman – can get to the summit […] you know, but how you do it … it’s the whole game, you know. How you do it, what kind of style can you pull it off in.’
Bachar would start out modest:
When he solos, he tells himself that he’s only going up 10 feet to check it out. He breaks a climb down into sections. ‘If things ain’t cool, no problem, I’ll just go down.’ If it does look good, he’ll go another 10 feet, then reevaluate, always keeping the door open for backing off. ‘It’s the only way I don’t get nervous.’ This is the way he’s done it for 30 years.
You can see the technique: breaking down the problem into potentially manageable chunks by bringing the attention to bear on the ten feet immediately ahead. Then, twenty feet or so off the ground, something would happen:
All of a sudden something clicks inside you. You’re a different person. The amount of power that you have access to is much greater than you would have in everyday life. Your whole body kicks in – it’s more the instinctual side of your being. You have these other powers that are available to you. I think we all have that capability inside of us, and when you free solo, you can tap into that. After a while, you start realizing you can turn your analytical mind off and connect with your animal mind, your instinctual mind. When you’re free soloing a tough spot or a hard section, you let your analytical side disappear and you trust your animal instincts. You can do incredible things. All of a sudden, you focus like you’ve never focused before. That’s a really addicting part of the whole thing because in a way, you get to see who you really are on a deep level, on an animal level, that you don’t get to see in everyday life.
It’s really comforting to get in contact with your total being. It’s so involving – you don’t feel alone. You feel like you’re plugged into some giant universal energy system or something. The rock doesn’t feel like rock – it feels like your partner.
When you’re doing it right, you’re also completely focused:
You’re so comfortable with this little circle of rock around you, with the consistency of the footholds and handholds, that’s all that exists. The ground is not there. There’s nothing else there except this fun little section of rock you have to move across and you’re thinking about how to move across it smoothly, efficiently and gracefully. If you’re doing it right, it should feel like you’re bouldering five feet off the ground, you’re so comfortable. But if there’s a little thought in your head saying, ‘I’m high off the ground, what if I fall?’ then you’re not doing it right. Even if one per cent of your mind is thinking about falling or something else, then you don’t belong there.11
It all comes down to a complete, intense focus on the immediate experience. Isn’t this fundamentally the same thing that the Buddhists look for in their ‘one-pointedness’ of mind? And isn’t it essentially the state achieved in the flow experience identified by Csíkszentmihályi?
One-Pointedness and Performance Under Pressure
One-pointedness is a helpful concept because it highlights the importance of fixing attention on the task in itself and the removal of extraneous elements from consciousness. ‘Flow’ had focused on the conditions that give rise to peak performance – the point where capability and challenge are equally matched. One-pointedness can take us a step further by identifying a preferred state of mind focussed not on outcomes but fully engaged on the task at hand.
* * *
Cultivating this one-pointed state of mind does, however, ask more of us than we might at first suppose. One of the first steps is to make room for a new understanding of the relationship between motivation and result. This involves disillusioning ourselves of the stubborn preconception that increased motivation improves performance: the more effort we put in, we think, the better we will do. It is a belief that lies at the centre of so much of what we do as humans both in our personal lives (think schooling) and in society (think economic incentives). But is it helpful?
The question was addressed back in the early years of the twentieth century by Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. Yerkes and Dodson had observed rats that had been placed in a cage and forced repeatedly to choose between one of two passages. On each trial a white card was hung above one passage and a black card above the other. Rats choosing the white card would meet with a reward; those choosing the black card would meet with a shock at a certain intensity level. What was significant was that the rats learned to avoid the shocks when the shocks were at an intermediate – not a high – level of intensity. The Yerkes-Dodson law holds that motivation increases performance – but only up to this intermediate point. When arousal becomes too high, performance declines.12
By the middle of the century, it had become apparent that there was another process engaged when motivation increases. Increased emotional arousal, it was established, acts to reduce the range of ‘cue utilization’ – it narrows the focus of attention on a variety of dimensions. This can be detrimental for complex tasks or tasks involving insight or creativity. The use of monetary awards for problem-solving tasks, for instance, has been shown to have negative effects on performance.13
Performance failure under pressure is a phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘choking’. Choking is seen especially in competitive sport, and there are two explanations for what is happening. It is possible that performance pressure increases self-consciousness and attention to step-by-step execution of skills, which disrupts automated processes. It is also possible that pressure causes thoughts about the situation and its importance to occupy working memory and distract attention from execution. Interestingly, while these two explanations have often been seen as incompatible, there is increasing awareness that they may both, in fact, describe a common phenomenon: in each case, pressure increases focus on task-irrelevant stimuli.14
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There’s no better way to end than to turn to the sportsmen and women themselves to hear how task-focus is maintained:
‘You have to take away winning and the consequences of winning … and [just] focus on the processes.’
‘I used to expect much more of myself, but I have learned to accept that you do make mistakes.’
‘I can’t control what people say about me. So, I focus on the task, and what I work towards is for me … no one else.’
‘I identify things I can control … I know what my processes are to reach my goal. I just concentrate on what I can control and forget about what I can’t control. Simple.’
‘I make an eagle … do I suppress that or ride the wave? The best bit of advice I got about that was … “what are you talking about!” It’s too much thought. Neutral is the gear you should play the game in … one shot after the next and that’s it.’
‘Positive doesn’t work. Negative doesn’t work. Neutral does. You focus on the skills, you complete the action.’
These are quotations from five elite golfers who excelled under pressure.15 No doubt similar accounts could be heard from elite performers in all walks of life.
The Path to Emei
Emei Mountain is a spectacular place. The mountain was formed back in prehistory when the collision of the Indian and Eurasian sub-tectonic plates created a dramatic vertical uplift of land that had once been at the bottom of the sea. The rock that makes up the mountain comes from ten of the thirteen known geological periods, creating a multitude of colour effects: there is pinkish granite, purple and green shale, limestone, dolomite and basalt, and to top it off a layer of dark-red basaltic lava on the summit. Emei isn’t the tallest mountain in the world by any means, but it is one of the most vertical: some of Emei’s peaks and ridges drop a breathtaking 2,000 m to the valleys below.
It’s not just the shape of Emei that makes it special – it’s what you encounter once you get there. The dramatic verticality means that Emei is divided effectively into three climatic zones. At the base it’s tropical, with an average temperature of 17.2° C, or 63° F. In the middle regions is the near-legendary ‘sea of green’. Cedar, conifer, cypress, as well as more unusual flower-bearing trees – crab-apple, woody lotus, and cassia – are all there, as well as a total of 107 plants that are unique to Emei. At the top of the mountain it’s cold, averaging only 3° C, or 37° F. Travellers ‘look like frozen little ants’, said the famous Song dynasty writer Su Shi. What he failed to mention is that most of the time you wouldn’t even be able to see them – fog descends on the mountain for an average 323 days per year.
Emei has drawn pilgrims for many centuries. In China, mountains are often considered holy places, and Emei is one impressive mountain. Another reason, though, is mystery of Emei’s ‘precious light’, an unusual optical effect that occurs on the summit under certain conditions. There has to be moisture in the air – raindrops, ice crystals, or snowflakes. The sun has to be shining from behind. And ahead of you there has to be a bank of fog or cloud onto which your shadow is projected. If all that occurs, you’ll see a spectacular light effect – a globe of light with a centre of concentrated brightness and a multicoloured outer corona. The precious light isn’t the only thing worth looking for on Emei, but it epitomizes just how exceptional the place is. One expert on Emei, James Hargett, puts it this way: ‘I have come to realize that nothing about Emei shan is ordinary’.16
* * *
Up on Emei Mountain, on the path leading to Elephant Bathing Pool, is a temple that is known as ‘Meeting Immortal Monastery’. There is an old folktale that has been told on those misty slopes about this monastery, a tale that is still told today.17
One day, long ago, a man was walking up the mountain between Elephant Bathing Pool and Nine Ancients Cavern. He was wearing nothing but a worn-out g
own, his eyes were dim, and his face was pale with exhaustion. He staggered onwards as far as he was able but eventually could go no farther and fell to the ground through weariness. As it happened, an old woodcutter – bundles of firewood strapped to a pole across his shoulders – was at the same time making his way downhill, and he came across the old man lying collapsed on the ground.
‘Good fellow, why are you lying here asleep on the mountain? If you wish to sleep, why do you not seek shelter and rest in one of the nearby monasteries?’
‘I’ve come from afar in search of immortality,’ replied the man. ‘But I’ve searched the whole mountain and not managed to find a single immortal. I’m now penniless. I collapsed here through hunger and exhaustion.’
The old woodcutter roared with laughter. ‘I’ve been cutting wood on this mountain longer than I can remember,’ he said, ‘and I have journeyed from the thickest forests to the highest peaks. In all these years I have never met an immortal. You had better forget this dream of yours and go home.’
‘I have no money, I’ve not eaten in days, and there is no strength left in these old legs of mine,’ replied the man. ‘How on earth can I get home?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you,’ said the old woodcutter. He set to work chopping off a branch of a nearby tree. When he had finished, he passed the branch to the man. ‘Sit astride the branch,’ he said, ‘close your eyes, and you will be carried home.’
