I attempted Mt. Shasta yesterday. It was my first time doing real mountaineering: leaving camp at 2 am, ice axing up a 50-degree snowfield, navigating over a crevasse, and reaching an elevation of 14000 feet. We had to turn around about half a mile below the summit because the route looked kind of sketchy and I didn’t have the energy to traverse more snow and scree with little room for error. I couldn’t tell exactly from our position, but it looked like the scree field continued downward at 45 degrees for at least a thousand feet—a slip would likely result in a fatal tumble. At that altitude, and given how much I had already exerted myself, I wasn’t sure that I could climb it without error, so we turned back.
During the climb, my frame of mind was mostly mild amusement at the ridiculous positions I found myself in. Am I seriously shitting into a bag while white-knuckling my ice axe on a steep snowfield at three in the morning? Was that terrible cracking noise on the rock face, like a hammer on marbles, above or below us? Will this snow bridge support my weight or will it send me tumbling into the bergschrund—the crevasse that forms as a glacier melts and separates from a rock face? (I learned from another climber that the snow bridge collapsed shortly after I crossed it on my way down. I was lucky.)
It was only afterwards, once I had painstakingly descended the rock and snow, lay flat on my sleeping pad, and swore over and over to never even look at a glacier again, that the tension released its vise grip. In its absence I noticed its existence for the first time. Under that tension, it felt like my mind had fused completely with my body. There was only the doing of the thing, the rhythmic chonk of the ice axe and the subsequent shuffling of my free hand and feet, the careful management of my center of gravity so as not to disturb the snow. Nearby rocks hovered in my awareness in a way not unlike a driver’s perception of cars on the freeway. The world was painted over in hazard signs, and my mind had dedicated a chunk of awareness to each one. The result was that, mentally, I had nothing to spare, and perceived very little emotion throughout the climb except for that amusement I mentioned earlier: a perpetual “are you serious” that precedes actual processing and digestion of information. Perhaps this provides some evolutionary advantage; it’s certainly unhelpful to experience abject terror when your life depends on executing simple actions perfectly.
Once I was safe, once the tension lifted, I encountered a chilling, radiating fear that briefly paralyzed me. It was not the greatest fear that I have ever experienced, but it was unusual—every other time I’ve been afraid, I was aware that I was being somewhat irrational, and that if I could just overcome the immediate terror everything would turn out alright. This fear was different because it was reasonable; it arose from the fact that the falling rocks were the size of SUVs and the crevasse might have a lake at the bottom and that if I slip and drop my ice axe I am going to be in so, so much trouble. This fear arose from a correct model of the world and in that it was as heavy as the mountain itself.
I expected the resultant feeling, of serious exertion and exposure to risk in an attempt to achieve a goal, to be transcendent. I had assumed that nothing in our society can perturb the man who stares down a mountain. What has actually happened is that I feel shaken, both physically and mentally. My memory of the sequence of events is patchy in a way that resembles my memories from a year or two ago. I still haven’t fully recovered from the piercing fear that beset me yesterday. I will be staying away from mountains for the foreseeable future.
If there is a takeaway, let it be this: I don’t think exposure to danger can cure fear, worry, or anxiety. One of the reasons I feel compelled to seek extremes is the hope that some experience will allow me gain perspective and break out of the cage of fear that I often find myself in. It feels to me like this behavior just draws out even more fear, developing simple, neutral thoughts like “glaciers have crevasses” into elaborate, detailed tapestries of horror painted vividly with visual memories and personal experiences. I consider that idea, that repeatedly evoking fear leads to its dispersion, to be false. I don’t yet know what the alternative is.
Your writing seems to have improved leaps and bounds in but a few weeks!
"I don’t yet know what the alternative is." have you asked yourself what is the cause of fear? Remove the cause and fear ceases. Not all at once. Gradually, then completely. Then even under the unceasing hail of Death, you are fearless, unshakable, free at last.
Fear has a specific causal structure that can be unwound systematically, with right awareness, right concentration, right effort and other factors.