We traverse the world in a vessel.

The vessel is home and has multiple windows.

Each window, a view of the world.

Each, a unique process and experience.

The windows are many, but we control which one is used.

No window is a wrong choice.

We’re composers of a symphony. Conductors of an orchestra.

We’re free to choose from an assortment of instruments.

Each with its unique cadence, flavour, texture.

Each entering and exiting the symphony at a moment’s request.

The rock is emotionless.

It’s out there, existing. It doesn’t change because of our feelings or desires.

Like the floor beneath the dancer, a blacksmith’s hammer or thermodynamics laws.

It won’t change its shape or respond to complaints. It won’t flinch.

The changing entities are within our bodies: fingers, shoulders, tendons.

With enough repetitions, they become stronger.

Mixed with patience, goals are achievable. That’s a good compromise but it’s not the best one.

The truly fulfilling skill comes as a realization at a given point in the path of habit.

As more of a “Oh OK, I can do this” rather than “Hooray, I just did this.”

The best kind of gratification is a realization in the middle of a recurring process.

A second-hand effect. A collateral of enjoying an acquired habit.

When starting out learning a new skill, referencing professionals and people at the top of the game isn’t the most efficient way to learn.

The skills are so advanced it’s hard to find techniques than can be practiced which are appropriate to the current level. Knowing how to bridge the gap between beginner and expert is a skill of its own. Oswaldo Zuniaga’s The Crux is a book that’s just about bridging this gap.

Watching professionals at work is enough for entertainment but should be considered with care as a resource for learning. If so, it can be easy to fall quickly into frustration due to the relatively slow learning and skill-acquiring process.

At this stage in my rock climbing journey, I get pretty much the same experience and learning than non-climbers from watching an Adam Ondra video sending Silence or Alex Honnold’s free soloing El Capitan. They’re such highly technical climbs and the mental challenge so large, that it’s hard for me to take notice of something practical that would make me improve. That’s where guys like Oswaldo come in. They provide the substance that lowers the barrier of entry for amateurs and enthusiasts like me, who do this as a non-professional activity.

The Crux pours even more magic into bridging the skills gap as it also covers mental and philosophical aspects inherent to rock climbing and nicely relates to other aspects of life itself.

This book makes a very efficient case that subjectiveness is not only bound to individuals but is also present in our social consciousness. It distorts our world-view on the important aspects that drive progress, and more immediately, help us understand problems.

The way we deal with world-wide problems through unsupported claims stems from our primitive brain and tribal thinking. It’s natural for our species. Even if claims are highly technical and based on the rational, if facts are incorrect, we’ll be going down the wrong path. Maps are a great piece of technology but even if we firmly believe in the practical uses of maps, if the map we’re following is faulty, we’d be going the wrong way.

What I enjoyed most of this book is its structure. It’s creative for framing the problem but also very efficient on its arguments and facts around them. Books that dwell on technicalities and are meant for a general audience —in this case economics, data interpretation and statistics— should take reference from this one. There’s no absolute need to reveal the technicals behind some arguments. It would make the book diverge from its intention, potentially boring or scaring away readers.

This story can be interpreted in two ways: a proud and courageous man in the pursuit of an achievement to the very end, defeating odds with discipline and perseverance in spite of risks or, a stubborn and foolish man, filled with wishful thinking, in a fight against his own ego, sense of purpose and external recognition.

I lean towards the latter. An old fisherman, haunted by feelings of an unfulfilling life, who goes out to sea on his chore and ends up entering a search for the ultimate rush, a grand prize that would earn him external recognition, set probably by his cultural context but ultimately by himself, in a battle against undefeatable nature.

Regarding writing style, I found beauty in how words flow through the old man’s actions and his thoughts. I found myself fully immersed in the character. I empathized with the constant battle between two sides: animal and rational. In this case, it’s the animal side that pulls the old man to the path of survival. The right path. It’s the side that’s constantly reminding him: “you’re tired”, “you’re losing energy”, “go back”, “leave the fish”, “you will die.” On the other side, and which differentiates us from animals, the disregard for survival that can only come from the human capacity to “rationalize” objectives, even if fulfilling them means death. It’s the side that goes: “suck it up”, “you can’t give up”, “almost there”, “you will win.”

It’s painful to read the old man’s foolish drive to bring the fish back. It reminded me of stories Mount Everest climbers that, after peaking, died on the down-climb. The thoughts of peaking blinds to the fact that climbing down is as challenging as climbing up. Not on the physical potency required, but because by the time they peaked, their bodies are so exhausted that survival hangs on a thread. The end of the journey is not reaching the peak, it’s the surviving the round trip.

Ego is a character within us, constantly arguing why we do anything. In the case of mountain climbers and in the case of the old man, ego is a foolish, self-interested advisor. If not careful, it will care only about peaking, or about catching a fish and bringing it back. Ego is satisfied, then abandons the body to fend for itself. Should we allow ego to put a blindfold and take the driver’s seat?

I blindly clicked a 5-star rating faster than any other book. It’s the product of an academic that doesn’t feel heavily technical at all. While very well researched and written, my rating mostly reflects the most comforting and pleasant feeling of having read the right book at the right time. Almost everything depicted in it reflects my current frame of mind.

The key takeaway is the argument that happiness is achieved by learning to enter flow in any activity we do, whether the activity is part of one’s goals, something mundane or something generally considered boring. It makes emphasis on the fact that entering flow at will —or achieving order to consciousness— is a skill, hence it’s something that can be practiced and improved, making it a habit. It goes through many examples of activities that inherently achieve it: yoga, rock climbing, creating art. However, the key is that flow is not restricted to these type of activities but can be applied to everything else considered less exciting or creative: cleaning dishes, taking out garbage, spending time in conversation, with family.

One phrase, very concise, sums up my learnings from this book:

The concentration of the flow experience —together with clear goals and immediate feedback— provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.

Very little can be argued against Frankl’s viewpoint as it comes validated from 3 years endured at the Auschwitz concentration camp. It’s what the entire first part of the book is about, with an emphasis on the psychological impact and, more importantly, the ways of psychological endurance.

Before this book, everything I’d read or seen related to the holocaust had been ultimately superficial. Even after reading Man’s Search For Meaning I realize there’s many layers to it that cannot ever be grasped by most single individuals in modern circumstances. We can only learn, reflect and loosely, clumsily connect dots.

The detailed retelling of camp life is a solid base for Frankl’s logotherapy theories. Even one of the most horrific situations that any person has endured, where all traits of personality, individuality, achievement, personal space, and even the most basic needs for survival, even after suffering the psychology of shared and individual loss, there’s still joy to be found by controlling what’s truly and always in our control: thoughts.

We’re an infinitely malleable entity if we so want it, if learn how to. On the one side, we’re limited by the capacities of our physical body. If we manage to avoid dying from a violation of a truly physical limitation, the other limit is —quite simply— our mind. The capacity to endure, after surpassing the hurdle of physical limitation, comes from how we react to circumstance, to context, to the environment, to the world around us.

What better proof of concept of this than the uncontrollably unjust and deeply inevitable WWII concentration camp life?

I saw an interview with George R.R. Martin and learned how art should not be a democracy. He was asked if fans influence his writing at any point. He replied “not so much” but the subtext was “absolutely not.”

He explained how it’s frustrating for an artist in Hollywood –a writer, in this case– when audiovisual arts are treated as a product. Scripts need market tests and adaptation so it has traction within a certain audience and market. An artist is not free in this context. It’s impossible to express artistic intuition when external factors are constantly routing your decisions or your finalized work.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve stopped trusting awards for any form of art. Their intention may be to project artistry but suffer the consequence of marketing and a profit-driven mindset. Why are these awards given out yearly? Why is an acting category split in gender while a writing or directing category is not? When sold as a product, a piece of art’s quality needs some form of measurement so the public’s uncertainty of invested time and money is predictable. Awards provide this measurement.

However, in their pure artistic intention, some films, recordings, paintings and books do not become relevant until they’ve passed the test of time; until they are digested individually and culturally after years. Some works aren’t relevant in the time they’re released, but become so much years later. And even in a more pure form, art may not be meant to be appreciated by a mass audience. It may not be meant for a public consensus. Some forms of it are an expression that exists and are appreciated for what they are, nothing more.

I was recently grazing through a Youtube’s video comments section and got caught by one listing a range of emotions displayed in the video. The list is: brokenness, wishful, regret, shattered, demand, anger, hope, reality, disbelief, denial, rage, sadness and emotionless.

I like this list. It’s a sum of emotions that I’ve learned are controllable, expectable and manageable when following stoic principles and practices. They are one extreme of the emotional spectrum. The other end is related to feelings such as euphoria, pleasure or involve activities such as daydreaming, or hoping. Stoics aim at the middle. If we practice negative visualization enough we can expect to rarely be impacted by such emotions. Their traits have already been experienced.

In particular, I think much less of the act of hoping. The blind hope we’re taught in childhood, by culture or by movies. A hidden lesson of non-control over life. An opium to soothe an incapacity for action and resolve. An antagonist of fortitude and progress. If seen from a certain perspective, it’s a lie to the mind. A habit of hoping encourages the expectation of resolve from external entities. It assigns solutions to, most likely, uncontrollable sources. Hope sabotages the capacity for creative solutions, for finding alternative paths. It blurs the ’third door’. It means a habit of giving up control before knowing if we never really had it in the first place.

Esto es el parafraseo de algunos pasajes escritos por Juan Eslava Galán en su libro “Historia de España contada para escépticos.”

No digo que todos los políticos sean corruptos pero sí todos los partidos tradicionales: PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, Podemos. Y el político que quiere medrar en ellos fatalmente se acaba convirtiendo en corrupto. Sea por comisión: metiendo la mano en la caja para el partido o en provecho propio, o sea por omisión: cuando conoce prácticas fraudulentas en sus compañeros y no las denuncia. De este mismo pecado de omisión no está limpio el ciudadano que sigue votando a políticos imputados e incluso condenados. En parte del libro se habla del “Antiguo Régimen”, donde la aristocracia explotaba al pueblo. Ahora el pueblo es la clase media y la nueva aristocracia son los partidos corruptos y el funcionariado improductivo que vive los pechos del Estado. El aperreado pueblo, carente de formación política, pero abrumado de impuestos, se desespera y se echa en los brazos de demagogos utópicos (como los de Podemos), quizá no tanto por ese paraíso que prometen como por vengarse de los profesionales de la política a los que consideran una panda de aprovechados, cuando no de corruptos. Lo malo (y lo históricamente normal) es que los que llegan para terminar con la casta se convertirán en casta ellos mismos en cuanto se les dé la ocasión. Como los cerdos de Orwell.

Este extracto es del penúltimo capítulo del libro, y yo en particular me puedo relacionar cercanamente. Los venezolanos hemos vivido la transición de castas en carne propia. La creación de una nueva aristocracia en los hombros de la venganza y el resentimiento. El intercambio de una banda de aprovechados por otra y todo en nuestras narices. Pero nosotros, el pueblo, como caballo con anteojeras, completamente ignorantes de las falsedades y mentiras del camino.

Y es aquí donde el estudio de la historia, de las ideologías, de la filosofía detrás de ellas y de la naturaleza humana me parece infinitamente más productivo y esclarecedor que seguir al día los medios noticiosos. El juego de poder es cíclico. Si aprendemos a identificar las señales del camino, en todas su transmutaciones históricas, el juego se hace más evidente y para uno es más fácil entender el status quo político y, muy probablemente, su futuro.