What One Month of Studying Mountaineering Taught Me About Uncertainty
Explore how studying mountaineers changed the way I think about uncertainty, preparation, and control.
What happens when we become curious about worlds we'll probably never inhabit?
Stepping into other people's worlds has always felt unusually natural to me.
Give me three conversations and enough curiosity, and I can usually figure out what makes someone tick.
I'm almost always asking the same type of investigative question.
Why?
So when YouTube started recommending mountaineering documentaries, I was genuinely curious. I've never wanted to climb a mountain. But before I knew it, I was completely locked in like crampons on ice.
Because it wasn't the mountains that fascinated me.
It wasn't just the enjoyment a mountaineer feels when sleeping outside in freezing temperatures, climbing for eight or ten hours, that felt bewildering.
It was how these people are willing to participate in something with THAT LEVEL of uncertainty.
I’ve read that mountaineering is like a meditation.
It suddenly doesn't matter that you can’t find the time to go to lunch or that you can’t get the reservation that you want. It’s only you and your survival to worry about, and some people need that level of head-clearing to connect to their most authentic selves.
Looks like we both share that passion, the passion of living authentically, but have different ways of arriving there.
Let’s step into the world of mountaineering for a bit and borrow a bit of a mountaineer’s frame of mind, in an attempt to loosen the grip that uncertainty has on the lives of the planners, the thinkers, the overly conscious group of beings in the world.
Acclimatization Is an Underrated Life Skill
Once a mountaineer hits base camp, they have to travel upwards toward different camps to reach the summit.
During skilled rotations, they move back and forth between the camps, allowing their bodies to adjust to changes in oxygen levels.
"Wait," I thought.
So progress isn’t linear on a mountain?
You move forward.
Then, intentionally backward to simply become the kind of person who can survive the next level.
When uncertainty feels unsafe to your nervous system, you don't slow down long enough to acclimatize.
You try to skip stages.
You search for guarantees, sometimes missing the very information that could prepare you for what's ahead.
Can You Truly Reverse-Engineer Guarantees?
If a five-to-six-figure expedition is at stake, of course, a mountaineer wants to do everything to reach the top.
This is when the summit fever kicks in the most!
As someone who knows how to plan and press the gas, I sometimes get down on myself when I don’t see a clear path to my goals.
But imagine not seeing a clear path forward while spending thousands of dollars and a month on a mountain acclimatizing?
I've spent a lot of my life believing that if I planned well enough, researched enough, anticipated enough, I could reduce uncertainty into something manageable.
Sometimes we spend so much energy reverse-engineering certainty that we forget certainty was never actually available.
And this is where my ultimate respect lies for the great mountaineers featured in this blog; they moved forward on such a large scale knowing certainty wasn’t guaranteed.
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The "Summit Bid" of The Game of Life
Life has its own summit bids.
The career.
The relationship.
The dream.
The move.
The version of yourself you're hoping exists on the other side.
The risk of not achieving may always be there, but the bid to achieve becomes the louder voice.
This is where we let life surprise us in beautiful ways.
You've spent enough time acclimatizing to uncertainty that you trust yourself wherever the mountain asks you to stand.
But maybe the goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty.
Maybe it's to become the kind of person who can keep climbing anyway.
What would change if you trusted that growing your capacity is progress, even when it doesn't look like forward motion?
For me, I think my relationships would evolve.
Because I wouldn’t need that much clarity from others to prove that they are making forward progress, when real change may be happening in their hearts and minds.
I would love to hear your experiences with summiting the mountain of uncertainty in the comments below.
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Happy Climbing!
-dd