No Fear

No fear. Let it be.

"Kindly let me help you or you will drown" said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree. -Alan Watts
    If you don't like heights don't watch this trailer for Free Solo.

I don't like heights but sat through the whole film. I left the cinema exhilarated and exhausted in equal measure. Alex Honnold is a solo free climber, meaning he climbs crazy rock-faces alone and with no equipment other than a bag of chalk. The film is a documentary covering his attempt at a free solo ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite. The first ever.

His feats are beyond the understanding of all but a very few. From the film... "people who know a little bit about climbing are like 'oh he's totally safe' and then people who really know exactly what he is doing are freaked out".

So how does he do it?

His strength is incredible. His flexibility amazing. His obsession clear. His technical ability obvious. All these are factors but the piece that stood out to me was when Alex had an MRI scan of his brain.

During the scan he was shown images designed to produce a fear response. Fear shows up as an activation of the amygdala. Whilst a "normal" person's amygdala lit up like a Christmas Tree, there was absolutely no response from Alex's super chilled amygdala.

Obviously Alex has a diagnosis. To the world it is Aspergers, but, to anyone familiar with these amazing beings, one glimpse of his eyes tells you all you need to know. His experience of the world is different to the neuro-typical and in this case the absence of fear allows him to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Alex reasoned that he had exhausted his amygdala through continual exposure to fear, which sounds reasonable. However, equally likely, in my opinion, is that he had never really experienced fear as you or I would. Perhaps he interprets some other feeling as fear, who knows?

Watching the film it appeared Alex had greater trouble navigating his relationship with his girlfriend who, logically from the 'normal' point of view, could not understand why he made the choices he did. (Animal Farm springs to mind (bit obscure that reference)).

Too often we judge and attempt to "help" (read interfere with or change) another with no real idea of what their experience is or how they are feeling about that experience. The greatest act of love is often to let things be. Alan Watts went so far as to say that all "do-gooding" or attempts to help are destructive because they are full of conceit. The conceit being the false notion that you know what is good for someone else. His example is genius:

"Kindly let me help you or you will drown" said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.

A little less impressive but of a similar nature was the performance of Harry Redknapp on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. For those of you outside the UK neither the person nor the programme are relevant to the point! Harry became a bit of a star in the camp because he was happy to do the "worst" duty which was to clean the latrines.

What a guy!

What self sacrifice!

Until you find out that Harry has no sense of smell. What to everybody else was a nightmare was just another job to Harry because his experience of it was different to everybody else.

Be wary of putting people on a pedestal or condemning them. Everyone is doing the best they can given their experience and their interpretation of that experience. Sometimes that interpretation produces behaviour perceived as good, other times perceived as bad.

These times are throwing up a lot of turmoil, a lot of behaviours, a lot of judgment.

Don't be quick to judge, including yourself.
Question your conclusions...are you sure its absolutely true?
If true, be true to your knowing.
Enjoy.
Love. Bill