3. Mountaineering as Meditation

Meditation, in my fairly unrefined understanding of the practice, is a means of facing life more directly and simply being with what we encounter in our experience, free of the consuming and distracting influence of excessive thought.

Finding oneself several hundred feet above the nearest landing place on a thin strip of rope – or minus the rope, even – is a remarkably effective means of achieving something very similar, of excluding the nonessential and prioritizing head-space for those things most deserving of it. One wrong move, after all, and you’re a goner.  Ventures over 12,000ft, moreover, have taught me that thoughts, despite their merely ‘metaphysical’ character, have weight. Trying to carry one at that altitude whilst simultaneously negotiating a glacier, crevasse, cliff-face or ridge just isn’t going to happen, not without compromising the ability to do so safely and at a decent rate of progress. When all energies are focused on the next step, handhold or foothold, and the consequences of not doing so well are potentially grave, my mind enters the present moment as it rarely has to or can during my day-to-day life. The result is a degree of calm, composure and a feeling of connection that I find hard to attain elsewhere. What is simply not available to me in the town or city, and only glimpsed in the meditation hall, arrives in spades whenever I find myself ‘out there’, suspended several hundred feet above a precipice, tip-toeing a paper-thin ridge or beating an ice wall with the mantra-like rhythm of crampons and axes.