Unfiltered Thoughts Five Days Until Release

I recently watched the documentary Free Solo, which follows rock-climber Alex Honnold in his quest to climb the treacherous El Capitan mountain on the west side of the Yosemite Valley…

…without ropes.

As I watched, it wasn’t the climb that fascinated me. It was the commitment to doing something so insane that almost no one could understand it. It was the glimpse into the mindset and the drive to do something that a person just has to do, even if other people don’t fully understand it.

The obsession.

In the documentary, Alex gets a new girlfriend named Sanni (who he would eventually marry) who is especially nervous for obvious reasons. One tiny mistake equals sure death and she doesn’t understand why he even would put himself in that situation.

In their van, Sanni looks him dead in the eyes and asks: “Would you quit climbing?”

“For what?” Alex asks.

“To maximize your life span.”

“No.”

Later on, he talks about how Sanni is a person who wants what every human being wants. She wants to be happy, and comfortable, and live a cozy life.

“Nobody achieves anything great by being happy and cozy,” he says.

There is something about Alex’s quest that I haven’t stopped thinking about since watching — the fact that sometimes, in life, you just have to do something regardless of what other people think about it. Some people just have that calling, that desire, the unconscious aching in their heart that their life will be wasted and incomplete if they don’t scale a 3,000 foot wall of granite without a rope or net.

Now, in order to do something like free solo, you need to be especially focused. You can’t just start climbing and hope for the best. You study, you train, and Alex does. Every day, he and his buddy climb with ropes, testing grips, deducing the best possible path for success. He wakes up at four in the morning, hikes out to the mountain, climbs, takes furious notes in his journal, goes home and studies the notes, the techniques, and the paths, and then does it all over again the next day.

All this effort, for what?

A chance to die?

Or is it for a chance to do something so great that you live forever?

I’m at Ground Floor Coffee in Downtown New Bedford right now as I type this. I’ve got my headphones in and am listening to music. My hood is pulled over my head and I’m locked into this blog.

This is for sure not the first time. I’ve come to Ground Floor Coffee almost every week for the past two years, typing away at my laptop for a few hours on some blog or chapter or other writing project.

There are a lot of other things I could do with my time. Right now its 1:15 PM on Thursday of my February vacation week. But I’m here, because this is what I do. I write, I work, I put in the time. That’s how you write a novel like Medusa.

I don’t expect anyone to really understand it.

I’m not climbing a mountain and I’m not putting my life on the line. But just like Alex, I have this urge to write, to create, to put together something that’s bigger than myself. It’s taken drive, commitment, and hours and hours of solitary planning, thinking, listening, note-taking, editing, writing, re-writing…

Everyone else just sees the book. On Tuesday, when it launches, people will start to read it. Some won’t finish it. Some will finish it in two days. They see the book, but they don’t see all that other stuff.

Just like Alex, I often fear that my commitment to it is isolating people around me. I worry that my social media posts are turning people off. I worry that my friends and family are wondering why I feel the need to put all this time, effort, and energy into a book that, when its all said and done, might flop. I worry about the isolation taking its toll on me mentally and emotionally.

I worry.

But I just have to climb the mountain.

I have to.

Love you guys.

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Medusa; Or, Men Entombed in Winter launches in just 5 days. You can check out the reviews on Goodreads and the novel’s landing page on Amazon.