climbing

I started rock climbing because it freed me from the monotony of training for sprint kayak. Climbing on rock is athletic and inspiring, and takes you to beautiful places. It can also be dangerous. Your decisions matter when you’re hanging from tired fingers far off the ground. The danger and the ticking clock of your tired muscles forces you to make each next move quickly and intuitively. Think too hard and you’ll start to get tired. Get too tired and you’ll fall. These consequences force me to fight my tendency to reduce sport to a plodding checklist. ...

I write software for fun and profit, and writing great software - like all creative work - requires long stretches of deep thought. I don’t know where creative insights come from, but two things are clear to me about how to find them: You can study and obsess over a problem as much as you want, but eventually you have to learn to sit and wait for your subconscious to bake all that work into something coherent. Sitting and waiting for those insights is excruciating. I started meditating a couple of years ago as a way to train myself to wait. Sit on a pillow, close your eyes, focus on your breath. If you haven’t ever done this, you should download Headspace, take 15 minutes and try it right now. You might think that it’s going to be relaxing. Instead you’ll discover that you, like me, have been living your entire life with a jabbering little monkey that’s terrified of boredom and specializes in drowning out those creative whispers from down deep. ...