For Wilshire Baptist Church
Something extraordinary happened early Saturday morning that didn’t get any attention but left me breathless reading about it two days later: While we were getting out of bed, drinking coffee, checking email and planning our day, a 31-year-old rock climber named Alex Honnold completed the first free-solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Translation: he climbed the 3,000-foot-tall granite monolith alone and without any ropes or safety gear of any kind. He did it in just under four hours.
This is of interest to me because we went to Yosemite in October, and when we saw motorists standing outside their cars and staring at the white face of El Capitan, we stopped too and looked up to see specks of humanity clinging to the sheer cliffs. We could see that they had ropes and other gear and were up there in teams to guide and help each other.
Honnold, on the other hand, had nothing and nobody with him on Saturday morning. He depended on his shoes, his bare fingers, some chalk to aid his grip, and years of training and practicing and developing amazing physical strength and mental focus. The climb involved 33 “pitches” – individual sections that required perfectly choreographed and executed hand grasps and toeholds, and precise balance and timing. Honnold spent two years mapping and perfecting each pitch with ropes and fellow climbers so that he would be ready to do it alone.
“I knew exactly what to do the whole way. A lot of the handholds feel like old friends,” he said in an interview with National Geographic magazine right after the climb.
But the most amazing thing to me is what else Honnold did not take with him on the climb: fear. He described it this way: “With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way. It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.”
National Geographic said scientists have studied Honnold’s brain to see how it copes with fear. They’ve found that that his amygdala, the part of the brain that reacts to fear, lays dormant when exposed to fearful stimuli. It’s not certain if his amygdala doesn’t fire the way most do or if other parts of his brain override it.
I can confirm that my amygdala reacts normally because I’ve never been fearless about anything in my life. I’ve stayed safely away from dangerous hobbies, and I still manage to tremble and sweat in the face of such mundane activities as school tests, work deadlines, music solos, public speaking and killing wasps. Most of my fears are about looking foolish or actually being found out to be foolish. Maybe if I prepared and worked as hard as Honnold on his handholds, these simple activities would become like “old friends” to me, too.
I’ve read several interviews with Honnold and have found no mention of God or a faith system. That’s not a criticism; it’s just interesting given how so many athletes today give God the credit for touchdowns and home runs. He did express a deep loyalty and trust in the people he has trained with over the years and who were his team as he plotted and planned what one called “the moon landing of free soloing.”
I believe that part of Honnold’s remarkable feat can be true for any of us: we can face our fears and allay them to some degree by surrounding ourselves with people who we trust for help and support. That might be office colleagues, good neighbors, long-time friends, family from near and far, fellow searchers in the pews at church.
As believers we pray to God for help when we are hanging on to life by our fingertips, but I believe there’s a sort of silent prayer that happens when we trust those who God has placed in our lives especially for that purpose. I won’t put words in Honnold’s mouth, but perhaps his years of preparation and trusting in those around him is just such a silent prayer. Perhaps he knows that the same God who created the mountains also brought those who helped him prepare for his amazing journey. In that way, his fearless calm may come from knowing he’s not so much alone after all.