Present Climbing
Learning to witness the life we’re already living.
This summer, while reading Henri Nouwen’s The Genesee Diary, I came across an image that has stayed with my thoughts ever since.
He recounts a passage from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describing two ways of climbing a mountain.
The first is ego climbing.
The climber is always measuring. Looking up to see how much farther there is to go. Looking down to see how much has already been covered. Counting steps. Conserving energy. Wondering how much is left. The summit is always on the mind.
Pirsig calls the second selfless climbing.
As I sat with that image, I found myself giving it another name.
Present climbing.
The climber is still moving toward the summit, but something is different. They stop, not because they have to, but because there is something worth noticing. The silence. The sun. The wind. The trees. The beauty around them. The conversation with the person beside them. They are not just climbing the mountain; they are experiencing it.
Both climbers may reach the same summit.
But they do not take the same journey.
I kept coming back to that image.
Further into the same diary, Nouwen writes something else I haven’t been able to put down. He writes that most of his fatigue is not about the work itself. It’s about what he calls “the false tensions I put into it.”
I recognized it immediately.
Not the tension of hard work. The tension I add myself. Chores I do while thinking something better is waiting somewhere else. Days I get through instead of actually witnessing.
We are physically present, with our mind somewhere else. Later, scrolling through the photos we took, we find we were absent from the very place we were standing in.
One evening in Tirana, I was walking back from the coffee shop after an afternoon of reading. I lifted my eyes, and there was a gorgeous sunset.
I stopped, slowed down, and savored it.
I thought of how privileged I am to witness sunsets from different corners of the world.
I don’t always witness my days. Some I just get through.
What would it take to slow down and just watch it?