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I stumbled on this documentary the other day, although “documentary” doesn’t feel like the right word. It’s simply a glimpse of something quietly, poignantly real; a 16-minute window into the most intimate parts of the mind, unobtrusively filmed and presented without explanation. It doesn’t need any. The beauty of the video is all in how you connect to the quiet human dramas that unfold on the screen.
You should really watch it before you finish reading this newsletter. It’s lovely.
Here’s the idea, and it’s brilliant. The filmmakers simply pointed cameras at volunteers as they stood on the 10-metre dive platform of a public pool, and considered taking the plunge. Some went up alone, others with a companion. They didn’t have to jump; they just had to stand there for at least two minutes, according to the rules laid out by the filmmakers. What they decided to do in that time was up to them.
What unfolds there, on the platform, is gently and yet urgently revealing, a tender study in the variety of ways that people negotiate fear. Some grow visibly anxious; others talk themselves through. One man stands at the edge, still as a statue, staring down at the water but, seemingly, unable to move. Juxtaposed against his image, we watch as a young girl reassures herself out loud — “all righty, let’s do this” — before running towards and over the edge. We don’t see the actual dive; that’s beside the point. What we do see is how she committed to it, how she worked herself up to it, how she pushed herself into making, and then executing, the decision.
The video does not invite stereotypes. Men are not more likely to jump than women; young are not braver than old. One man in his twenties peers nervously over the edge, then tenses his muscles and springs into a jump but, in the same moment, pinwheels his arms wildly to hold him on the platform. It’s remarkable to watch, knowing exactly the civil war raging in his mind, as the conscious self and the instinctual, prehistoric part of the brain seize different parts of the body. “Jeez,” he says, once he recovers his balance. “It’s impossible.” He walks away from the edge, turns back towards it once, waves it off with a laugh, and climbs back down the ladder.
A couple approaches the jump together, and the conversation that unfolds on the platform shows how they draw strength from the other. One man dives off the ledge with relatively little hesitation, then returns to try and coax his anxious buddy to do the same. Of all these scenes, one is especially poignant. A middle-aged woman stops at the edge of the platform. She considers jumping, but her courage fails her; she begins to climb down the ladder. But as her feet descend the steps, something stops her. She stays frozen for a minute, hands gripping the railings, until suddenly, with a wordless grit, she hauls herself back up and strides right off the edge.
What makes the video so remarkable is that, because the setting is so simple and the fear so nearly universal, the inner journey that played out in her mind as she stood on that ladder becomes nearly visible. We can never really know what another person is thinking; and yet, in that moment and others in Ten Meter Tower, we can immediately recognize and connect with the subjects’ inner monologue. We know exactly what they are feeling, what they are thinking, what they are working through. So when they take the plunge — and when they do not — we jump or cower along with them, too. More than that, though we know absolutely nothing about them, I found myself caring about the people on the platform, caring deeply about them with a protective sort of warmth. In seeing their fear and their vulnerability, we see all we need to offer our love.
Journalism is most powerful when it shows not just a life, but a heart and a mind. I’ve seen a lot of stunning documentaries in my time; but I don’t think I’ve seen anything that makes this connection between inner selves so effectively as Ten Meter Tower.
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After watching that video, I tried to think about the scariest thing I’ve ever done. The biggest leap I’ve ever made, the biggest risk I’ve ever taken. It alarmed me that, after extensive review of my life, I came up empty-handed.
I mean, there are times when I’ve been afraid, but that’s not the same as choosing to do something scary. I had a crippling fear of flying for a long time, and pushed myself to get back on a plane; eventually, with increased exposure, I wrangled my fear down to a manageable level. On the flip side, I’ve done things that should have scared me, but didn’t: when I was 18, I quit my part-time retail job just a few months after moving into my first apartment, pledging to make it as a freelance writer. This was not a smart decision, financially speaking, and at the time it seemed very daring and thrilling. But in retrospect, it wasn’t actually scary. My dad was there to bail me out whenever I couldn’t pay bills, which was often; very little was truly risked.
That fact reminds me of this: the idea of taking risks, of pushing yourself past your fears to do scary things, is often valorized in this culture. Just think of all the profiles you’ve read of some rising actor or young business wizard who is lauded for giving up everything they had, at least on the surface, to “follow their passion.” (I am quite sure I have written my fair share of these.) But these profiles always gloss over the fact that the ability to take big risks is inextricably tied up with privilege. It still takes courage, and it still isn’t easy, but it’s at least easier to jump when one is assured a deep pool to plunge into, or a safe place to land.
Would I have ever made it as a writer, if my father hadn’t been there? Or, conversely, what could I have become if I’d done the things that truly scared me? What if I had packed up and made that move to Toronto in my early 20s? What if I had been more aggressive about pitching publications outside of Winnipeg? What if I hadn’t traded ambition in the name of what felt safe, what felt secure, what felt grounded?
Once, not long after she had her first kid, my friend A. sold her house and bought a camper van and spent a couple of years jaunting around North America with the baby in tow. Along the way, she watched the space shuttle launch, joined a roller derby team, and had what seemed to me to be a constant stream of adventures that the rest of us followed on social media; I never understood how she did it. I never understood how she could give up everything she knew without anything there to catch her. But I also envied her that freedom; not the physical freedom, I mean, but the one from the cages built by her own mind.
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As I ruminated on what I took away from Ten Meter Tower, my thoughts drifted to one of my all-time favourite documentaries, 2018’s Free Solo. The film, which can be streamed on Disney+, follows climber Alex Honnold as he attempts a historic free solo ascent of the massive El Capitan rock face in California’s Yosemite National Park. (If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, which you should, here are some of the climbing highlights.)
Free soloing is exactly what it sounds like: climbing alone and without ropes, without safety gear, without anything whatsoever to stop you if you fall. It’s exactly as dangerous as it sounds; it’s often noted that injuries in free soloing are relatively rare, because if something goes wrong, you’re not getting hurt, you’re just getting dead. Some companies will not sponsor free solo climbers, so as not to encourage the behaviour.
Yet all of this means that free soloing — especially a wall like El Cap, 900 metres of vertical rock to which a climber must often cling with nothing more than the tips of their fingers and their thumb — is perhaps the most fascinating pursuit in the world. It’s a staggering physical and mental achievement, so intense on both fronts it pushes our understanding of the limits of both. Even thinking about it too hard can be enough to drive one’s stomach right into one’s throat; despite knowing from the start how Free Solo ends (spoiler alert, the guy lives), it’s still viscerally terrifying to watch. I’ve seen it five times, and still catch myself gasping at the most dizzying shots.
Free Solo’s filmmakers — led by Jimmy Chin, himself an accomplished climber — understand that most people cannot comprehend how (or why) they do what they do. So the documentary is not just a story of a climb that seems, to be frank, insane, but a character study of a man who would do such an unimaginable thing. Is it something about how his brain works? A death wish? A personality defect? (Some of his ex-girlfriends have said that, he says, without a hint of offence taken.) Is he a thrill-seeker, chasing the high no matter how reckless?
The film lays out evidence, but does not try to definitively answer that question. It’s clear that Honnold is no thrill-seeker, and he is absolutely not reckless. There is an interesting element to his brain, though it’s not clear whether it’s by training or genetics: an MRI showed that Honnold’s amygdala, a part of the brain that plays a primary role in processing highly reactive emotional and fear-based responses, does not seem to activate in response to threatening stimuli the way other people’s do. There’s nothing wrong with his amygdala, the doctor explains, it’s just that the level of stimulation required to make it crackle to life is far higher in him than the rest of us.
“Maybe my amygdala’s just tired,” he says.
The more interesting thing is how the movie gently explores Honnold’s relationship with death. He doesn’t want to die, he tells us. But he also accepts his own death, and does not romanticize his own absence from the world; if he dies, he shrugs, his friends will be like “oh, that’s so terrible,” but life will go on. He’s told the same thing to ex-girlfriends, too, adding that they’ll find someone else. That sounds callous, he admits. It does, but but here’s the thing: it’s also true. This is not to lessen the pain of grief, but the fact is that life does go on, and people recover from loss.
But what drives him to take those risks? Of all the pursuits in the world, he explains, it’s free soloing that most demands perfection. In that way, there is no greater test of mastery or self-control. If you are perfect on the wall, you might make it. If you aren’t, you will die. There is no middle ground. There’s no “good enough.” There is no “you tried.” When he explains it like this, I get a glimpse — not a full view, but a glimpse — of what draws him up those looming faces of rock, time after time.
In comparing Free Solo with Ten Meter Tower — both in very different ways a study in fear, both an invitation to consider our own — it occurs to me that they are effective in different ways. While Ten Meter Tower allows us to connect through the immediate recognition of the subjects’ inner experience, Free Solo is different. It’s beautiful to me because, no matter how much I watch it, I cannot relate to Honnold. I cannot imagine myself on that wall. I cannot begin to comprehend what is going through his mind as the camera finds his face, pressed against this barren vertical world, with just a few millimetres of rock holding his body back from plunging into the valley thousands of feet below.
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Here’s my admission: I want to jump. I want to climb the wall. I want to do something that scares me. It gets harder as you get older, partly because responsibilities mount, but mostly because there’s so much less rope left in your life to catch you if you fall. If it was hard to imagine giving up my life and moving to Toronto to try and make it at age 20, it’s trebly hard to imagine that now. There’s no more dad to bail me out, either. I still have enough privilege to contemplate taking some sort of amygdala-activating action, but now it’s been whittled down to what I hold alone.
What does doing something that scares me look like? I don’t know, I don’t know. Ask me that question in a year, or a dozen. All I know is this: when I sat down to reflect on times I took the plunge, I couldn’t name one. In my life, I have generally chosen safety over adventure, security over ambition. I was the person on the diving tower who, not trusting enough that the pool could safely catch them, not able to win the civil war in the brain against the ancestral instincts fighting to keep their bodies on the ground, chose to turn around and climb back down.
There’s no point in regretting this. I don’t. It’s been done, and overall, it’s done me good enough. But there’s also a time to wonder what you could accomplish, when you put yourself in a place that demands perfection. Maybe you find out you were capable of things that you, and even those around you, never imagined. Or maybe, you find out that what you feared was actually a relic passed down through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, once serving to keep us safe and alive but, in the context of a very different place and time, only holding us above the deeper joys of this life.
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A minor housekeeping note: for some reason I do not understand, responses to the newsletter get threaded very strangely in my email inbox. I tend to find responses weeks after you sent them. So: if you responded to one of these but never heard back from me, just know that I’m so very appreciative for you reading, and so sorry I didn’t reply. The best way to get at me is usually via Twitter at @doubleemmartin or direct email at melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca.