Mistakes

El Capitan, Yosemite

Standing in El Capitan meadow on a beautifully golden October day in 2008, Rob handed me his headphones. He had managed to convince Hans Florine, who was speed-climbing “the Nose” with his partner Yuji Hirayama, to wear a recording device. Listening, I could hear Hans’ heavy breathing as he slid over the rock face, rushing to beat the record time the two of them had set only a few months before. Rob took the headphones back. “I can’t feel my fingers!” he quoted Hans as saying. The morning was cold, and the rock face may have been icy. But the sky was deep blue and the cottonwood leaves were golden and shivering among the long-needled pines and drying oaks.

Rob and my husband Don had a contract to interview the two climbers. They had caught them as they began, Don with a camera, Rob with his sound recorder. Knowing I would love being in Yosemite in the fall, Don had suggested I come along. Maybe I could help. Now the three of us stood with others, some with rock climbing books detailing the ascent. The climbers were too far away to see at this point.

The previous climb had taken about two and a half hours. We nipped out for lunch, at Rob’s insistence. When we returned, we could hear Hans and Yuji coming down a hill. We rushed to get the equipment into position. “Where’s that reflector?” yelled Don. “It’s in the trunk,” I responded.

Yuji and Hans came down in high spirits, carrying a bottle of Champagne, their heads crowned with laurel leaves. They had managed to best their previous record by at least five minutes. The interview went well, Hans surprising Don by asking how he was doing. Later, packing up, Don said to Rob, “Racoon eyes,” voicing his regret that, in the afternoon sun, Hans’ and Yuji’s eyes were hooded, hardly visible.

My heart sank. All of a sudden I realized that it was my fault. If I had had the sense to bring the reflector and use it to direct the sun into their faces, as I knew how to do, we would have been able to see their eyes. It was the one thing, other than carrying things, that would have justified my presence on the shoot! But I had not had that presence of mind. It showed just how far away I was from being useful, even after being on many film shoots. Don didn’t fault me. He is always encouraging, but he and Rob had worked together for years and understood each other.

This was a mistake which comes to haunt me, along with others, when I am in the mood to look at them. None are life-threatening, mostly things in which I could have saved others time or trouble. Sometimes I created the trouble! Mistakes are the accounting between the inner life and the external world, an accounting which it is best to keep as fresh and simple as possible. I have been lucky in not having had to make moral decisions in dire, threatening situations, but there are always mistakes, and, as they say, “hindsight is 20-20.”

Jonathan Pageau, in this recent talk, makes the point that disappointments in life are not only common, they are necessary. “We live in a strange kind of tension, … in order for us to find joy and some consolation in the world, we have to always be giving it up toward a higher participation. As soon as we try to grab it, as soon as we try to rest in it, then it breaks down,” he says. He feels that in the fullness of things there is always insufficiency. That is actually how reality works. Whatever we grasp for becomes an idol for us. We need to exist in the presence of something higher, which can put our building and grasping into perspective.

Pageau comes from Quebec, is an icon carver in the Greek Orthodox tradition and a prolific speaker on cultural symbols. I’ve been watching his YouTube presence for quite a while and am always impressed with the way he expresses Christian truths in contemporary ways, thoroughly embracing quantum physics and chaos theory!

In secular traditions today, we don’t dwell on mistakes, putting them into the category of learning situations. But usually we can’t go back. We must live with our mistakes and their results, apologizing, and forgiving ourselves as best we can. In the great AA tradition, which has helped so many people find new lives, amends are made with humility, but this tradition too insists on the presence of a Higher Power, as one experiences it.

In martial arts training, as in spiritual training, it is impossible to get to an end or a goal. There is always further to go. It is the reason that such training takes place in the presence of a master, who is also working within a tradition or lineage. The master is the measure of our progress, but good ones don’t dwell on accomplishment, emphasizing the practice and the path.

Sport, such as rock climbing, and team sports, always have clear and present goals. As do professions, such as Don and Rob’s filmmaking. In science, literature and the arts, it is sometimes hard to tell whether something is a mistake or not! It may lead to a new discovery.

But we all want to feel that our daily actions have some use. And that requires an over-arching framework within which to work, as Pageau’s talk emphasizes. Who is making the value judgment? Are we left on our own to do so? As free people, we are. Of course we will disappoint ourselves and others. We exist in a matrix of great complexity and everything matters. But we can be assured that we are working within a moral and meaningful universe. There will be joy. There may even be laurel leaves and champagne! Onward!