He climbed a skyscraper and risked dying on live TV. Here’s what I learned from Honnold about climbing, living, and practicing the precepts.

Transcript #

Back in January, the famous climber, Alex Honnold, climbed a skyscraper in Taiwan without a rope, live on TV. Honnold, of course, is famous for free soloing El Capitan in the Free Solo movie in 2018. For this skyscraper climb in January, there were thousands of people watching from the ground, and there were thousands of people in the building watching him go past them, through the windows. There were millions of people watching him live on Netflix. I’ve heard rumors that there was a 10-second delay on the live stream so that if he fell, nobody would see him die on TV. But of course, the people who were there in person would have seen him die.

Honnold announced that he was going to do this a few months before he did. The consensus among non-climbers was that this was reckless. The consensus among climbers was that it was tasteless. And that was kind of my reaction, too.

I’m a rock climber, I’ve been following Honnold’s career for many, many years, and I thought, this is so disappointing. This is just a tasteless stunt. But I watched it, of course …

The day Honnold climbed the skyscraper was, because of time zones, the night before I was going to do a really big climb in Mexico. That night I watched him on my laptop while I was sitting in bed at a hostel near the crag, before I went to sleep. The climb that I was getting ready for is called Time Wave Zero. It’s a 2,300-foot-tall, nearly vertical limestone cliff. That’s about ten times as high as anything that I usually climb in the Gunks, here in upstate New York. Some of the climbing on Time Wave Zero was going to be hard, but mostly it was just big. I was going to climb it with my good friend and partner, Chris, and we planned to do it in one day, so we weren’t going to sleep on the wall. We were hoping to get it done in 12 hours. I had been thinking about this climb for months, and I had been training for it, and I was just so anxious. That we would go too slow. That we’d be—if we started at dawn—that we’d still be there at nightfall and climbing all night. That I would get really tired. That I’d get really scared. That I’d slow Chris down.

And then I was also really worried about the rappels. For most people it takes about eight hours to climb up, but then it’s four or five hours rappeling down, because you have to rappel 100 feet, then pull your rope, thread it through the next anchor, deal with all your knots and tangles, and make sure that you know where the next anchor is, 100 feet below you. Making a mistake at any of these steps can get you either stuck or killed. So that was on my mind as well.

So with all of that on my mind, I watched on my laptop Alex Honnold climb a skyscraper. And it was glorious. I changed my mind. It wasn’t a stunt at all. It was a work of art. He climbed both carefully and carefree, with so much confidence, so solid on every move. I never doubted for a moment whether he was going to make the climb, and I could tell that he wasn’t doubting himself either. Towards the top, when he knew he really had the thing in the bag, he got joyful, like a kid, he was playing around. He had a headset so that he could talk to the Netflix commentators, and he was joking with them while he climbed. He would, cling to a piece of the building with one hand and try to high-five a spectator inside the building through one of the windows. There was one moment where he let his feet swing out. So he was just holding on to the building by two hands, and then he let go so he was holding by one hand. He said, “get a load of this.”

Like we say in Zen, there was not one hairsbreadth deviation between him and his movement. He was one with it.

When he got to the top, his wife was there and she was telling him. “You climbed it so fast. I kept thinking that I wanted you to slow down and rest longer at the ledges.” And he said, “Oh, really? I thought I was going super slow.” And that’s interesting, because before he did the climb, he estimated it would take him four hours, and, in fact, it barely took him an hour and a half. But he was just in the flow; time was slowing down for him.

There’s a song by Fountains of Wayne about this state of flow that I love, even though it’s a song about football.

The clock’s running down. The team’s losing ground. To the opposing defense.

The young quarterback. Waits for the snap. When suddenly it all starts to make sense.

He’s got all kinds of time. He’s got all kinds of time. All kinds of time. He’s got all kinds of time. All kinds of time.

He takes a step back. He’s under attack. But he knows that no one can touch him now.

He seems so at ease. A strange inner peace. Is all that he’s feeling somehow.

He’s got all kinds of time. He’s got all kinds of time. All kinds of time. He’s got all kinds of time. All kinds of time.

I think we know that feeling, where it’s just all coming together and there’s no hurry at all. So I loved watching Honnold climb and it wasn’t a stunt at all. It was like he was using his body and the building and his fingers and his toes and the weather and the audience as materials in a work of art.

And death was also one of his materials. Maybe it was even a work of art about death, about joy in the face of certain death. Honnold’s not very analytical, so he didn’t explain in a lot of detail why he was climbing. He just said it was “rad.”

But one thing that’s clear to me is that Alex Honnold is afraid a lot. In a Netflix interview before the climb, he said, “When you do something that you’ve never done before, you never totally know you’re ready, and that fear is always there.”

Back when he was 23, there’s a film of him free soloing in Yosemite. In the film, he freezes with fear. He’s on a narrow ledge, so he’s not holding on. He’s actually facing out into the thousands of feet of empty air around him, and he’s got his hands and his back against the wall. He looks over at the cameraman and he says, “I’m freaking out right now.” I can relate to this. When I’m climbing, it’s often the moment when I’m secure, but I have to move away from security, I have to get off a little ledge and start climbing again—that can be the worst. In the film, he just breathes really hard for a few seconds, then he turns around to face the wall and he starts climbing again. I’ve done that, too.

In an interview with a psychologist years later, Honnold said,

I’ve had many things happen that have given me a massive jolt of adrenaline and I’ve had to calm myself down again—like a hold breaking while I’m free soloing. You can quickly learn to ignore what your body is doing at such moments and carry on like normal. You’ve got no other option. If something like that happens, your body is almost in a state of shock for a little while. Your heart pounds, your legs tremble or ache, crazy things like that. But I have learned: none of these things need to have any bearing at all on the climb ahead of you. They are a physiological reaction to something that already occurred. They basically don’t matter at all for your performance ahead. So you can learn to ignore them entirely and carry on like normal. Which calms you back down a lot more rapidly. So, if I get very scared because a piece of rock comes away from the wall and so my hold is gone, or I lose my footing, I know that doesn’t mean anything about the rest of my climb.

So there’s all this evidence that Honnold gets scared and that he’s trained himself to deal with it. But for some reason, it seems like most people think that he’s just born with an innate lack of fear. That there’s something wrong with his brain. I mentioned him to another climber recently and the climber responded, Oh, Alex Honnold, his amygdala doesn’t work, right?

There’s a scene in the Free Solo documentary from 2018, which I think has contributed to this. There is a psychologist doing an experiment on him. He goes into an fMRI to measure the blood flow to his amygdala while he’s shown scary photos like horrible burns or a guy holding a knife or a woman shaving her crotch—that’s apparently one of the scary photos. The researcher is amazed to see that Honnold’s amygdala does not respond to these. So people watching this scene in the movie might conclude, there’s something different about Honnold’s brain. And it’s true, there is something different about his brain, because he’s trained himself differently!

So why do we separate ourselves from him like this? Why do we pretend that he’s not really human, that he’s not like us? That his mental strength is some sort of birth defect? What are we afraid of—if we knew that we also could train ourselves like this, what would that mean for us? What are we protecting, with this idea that we can’t? It would imply that we all have the potential to become the heroes that we admire.

Honnold trained himself to be able to recover from fear, to get back in the flow. And what are we training ourselves for? As bodhisattvas, we’re training ourselves to be wise and compassionate more often. Wise enough to see that we are not separate things to protect and promote—we’re no more separate than a wave is separate from the ocean. And we are training ourselves to be compassionate enough to forgive everybody, so that we can all emancipate ourselves from suffering together. Buddha discovered when he was sitting under the Bodhi tree that we all have this potential. He had vowed to discover the solution to suffering from sickness, old age, and death. It took him a week and then he got it. And he said, according to the Avatamsaka Sutra, as he saw the morning star rising up, he said,

I now see all sentient beings everywhere fully posses the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones, but because of false conceptions and attachments they do not realize it.

We already have it; we just don’t realize it.

There’s a concept in Buddhism of the storehouse consciousness, the alaya-vijñana. The storehouse consciousness is where all the seeds of consciousness are. We are born already having all of these seeds. We have the seed of courage, and of fear, and of generosity and greed, and of anger and grace. All of it. These seeds have existed since long before we were born. We can guide our own lives by choosing which of these seeds to water and which not to. If we water the seed of fear, we’ll be more fearful in the future. If we water the seed of courage, we’ll deal with fear better. It means that my existence is like a garden, and I’m responsible for how it grows. The weeds are always ready to spread up, and that’s okay, but to act with wisdom and compassion, it helps to water the seeds of wisdom and compassion continuously.

I’m actually taking a break right now from a sesshin. The New Paltz Zen Center upstate is doing a jukai sesshin. We’ve got seven people sitting, and two are taking jukai, so they are studying the precepts and sewing rakusus, and they’re going to vow on Sunday to uphold the precepts. So this is the week to really buckle down and water those seeds of behaving according to the precepts.

Besides Alex Honnold, there’s another brave climber I admire. She’s not as famous, her name is Joanne Urioste. She’s in her 70s now. Back in the day, she established a lot of really risky, bold climbs in Red Rock Canyon outside of Vegas. She and her husband, they approached climbing with strict ethical standards. Their conception of ethical climbing was to harm the rock as little as possible, meaning put as few bolts in as possible. But that means that if you’re lead climbing, if you’re the one getting the rope from the bottom to the top, and you fall from far above a bolt, you will fall very, very far and maybe get hurt or killed. She thought it was worth the risk because of the respect that it expressed for the rock. On a podcast recently, the host asked Joanne Urioste: she was climbing 30, 40, 50 years ago, back when all the other climbers were tough men. How did you deal with that? And Urioste said that the need to look good, it’s like an extra weight on your climbing harness, like big bottle of toxic water weighing you down. She said,

If you can find some way to take a few drops of water out of this toxic gallon bottle of personal need to perform, it can be absolutely incredible. And it can be very freeing for life, not just for climbing. With work and with time, you can get to this state of serenity where you absolutely do not care whether you look bad in front of somebody else. And you’re in a state of complete silence when you’re leading. It’s like total dead silence. Your body executing the moves because you’ve decided that this is an appropriate thing to do. You’re willing to take the risk because you’ve premeditated whether this is appropriate or not. And once you step into this task of getting from point A to point B, maybe this bolt to that bolt, this point to the summit, then, okay, I’m in a state of total silence, total internal silence.

That’s kind of a midway step. A more advanced state is more of a metaphysical state. It’s not encountered by everybody. But for me personally, it was encountered when I had a combination of high risk, high level of exhaustion, and a high level of pain. And I’m not recommending other people do this because if you did it and it didn’t work, you might die. But I have had periods of time where I’ve had conversations with invisible people who have helped me. I have had invisible people come into my body and take over my body and get me through a section [of climbing].

I think I understand the first part, but not the second. I haven’t experienced that myself and I don’t think that is my path. I don’t want to push myself into extremis like Joanne Urioste. I just kind of want to climb like Alex Honnold. That grace and that confidence and that joy.

So the day after he climbed the skyscraper, my partner Chris and I got up before dawn and walked to the base of Time Wave Zero in Mexico. It was cold and misty. Chris led the first pitch, which was a really easy 5.7, and I followed him to the anchor, and then I led the second pitch, which was a hard 5.11b, and I managed to climb that without falling, which I was very proud of. But the mist had soaked my shirt. I was just in a T-shirt, and I was shivering really hard. So I lowered the rope to Chris, he attached my backpack to it, I hauled it back up. I got my down coat out, put that on. Then I belayed Chris up. But I was shaking, and my teeth were chattering. It’s the coldest I can actually ever remember being. I was barely functioning. But, you know, I hung there at the anchor belaying him, and I just took it because I knew: this too shall pass. At some point later today, I’ll probably be super hot and wishing I was cold instead. Meanwhile, the only thing to do is just be cold and belay Chris.

So we alternated like this, each of us leading 100 feet or 200 feet, and then following, swapping leader and follower for the nine hours it took us to get to the top. It was definitely warm enough once the sun was out.

This is by far the most climbing that I’ve ever done in a day, and it’s also the tallest thing I’ve ever climbed. There were times when I was scared, or nauseated from dehydration, or too hot or too cold, or had to pee really bad. I was worried whether we were going to be quick enough, or worried about a dozen other things that were going to happen in the future. I’m really glad that I watched Alex Honnold the night before: It was great prep, because whenever I doubted myself, I would think of him. How would Alex Honnold climb this pitch? How do I embody that confidence and that enjoyment? Obviously, it’s just by taking the next handhold, finding the next foothold, checking every knot, checking every carabiner, doing the next thing. When you’re thirsty, get your pack out and drink some water. When you have to pee, find a ledge, and pee off to the side of the route so it doesn’t get on the handholds. It’s just this.

And also don’t forget to have fun. Even though climbing is dangerous, it’s both dangerous and fun.

There’s the Zen parable about the man dangling from a cliff, and there’s a lot of different versions of this, but here’s the version that’s in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. It goes:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Even if you make it to the top of the skyscraper, you’re going to die anyway, so you might as well enjoy the strawberry while it lasts.

So at New Paltz Zen Center, we’re studying the precepts, and the precepts have long been a logical puzzle for me. Why should we behave ethically? And why should we follow one set of ethical principles rather than some other? If other beings don’t have separate existence, why should we be compassionate towards them? If we are empty, why does it matter if we do good or not? The earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun. Why does any of this matter?

The classical Buddhist answer is that in order to emancipate yourself from suffering, you must not harm other beings. It makes no sense to talk about liberty while you’re oppressing people. (Thomas Jefferson …)

The Mahayana answer is that we’re not separate from each other, and so doing harm to others is just as illogical as doing harm to oneself. One of my hands doesn’t steal the mitten from the other hand, because they’re one body.

Another answer is to look at what climbers mean by ethics. Some climbers say ethical climbing is not placing too many bolts, not doing too much harm to the rock. Or not claiming to have climbed a route that you didn’t. Or free-soloing a route, if you say that you’re going to do it without a rope. These are arbitrary, just rules of the game. They’re empty. But they do have a purpose, which is to clarify: what sort of artistic statement do you want to make with this climb? What principle are you expressing with the style in which you climb this route? And it might be different at different times, whether you’re leading or free-soloing or top-roping or whatever. But all of these different styles of climbing have their own integrity because they follow principles. And I think that’s the same for a whole life. What style do you want to live in? What sort of self-expression is your life? When it comes to the precepts, there’s no single right or wrong answer about this. But I think we can agree that a beautifully expressed life has, as a prerequisite, that it is an ethical life.

Being conscious of our ethical responsibilities and intentionally expressing ourselves in the way we live takes some training, to maintain this consciousness. And, that’s what we do when we sit, and that’s what we do on sesshin. So, good luck with that!