How to Climb Everest
Failure in the Art Zone? Respawn and begin again.
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
I have died a thousand times on Everest. On my Everest. Or should I say, Everests, plural.
Painful deaths, lonely deaths, public and embarrassing deaths that bring shame to my family name. Cautionary tale deaths that are destined to become a five-part Netflix documentary that could oh so easily have been a tight two.
But it’s OK.
My Everest is my Neverest™.
The work of it. The expedition and the adventuring toward creation. The relentless swirl.
You must never rest in the pursuit of your Neverests.
My deaths have been documented. By me, for me, and with me, so that I may accurately mark my existence in this world. Noted in a ledger with the date and cause and sometimes final resting place coordinates should I ever need to recover the body of an attempt.
After each death, I hold up the community newspaper of my brain and flip to the announcement. Small, barely the size of a postage stamp, and nestled right between the crossword and Sodoku:
“Writer Dies in Latest Neverest ascent. Attempting All, Failing Everything.”
The media. I swear. So dramatic.
There are numerous ways to die on Neverest and not enough fingers to count them all. There’s a frostbite joke in there somewhere but it’s not funny and who has time for that when gearing up again for their next Neverest attempt? One expedition finishes—successful or not—and the next begins. That is the ebb and flow of traffic on Neverest. The ebb and flow of creative life and death.
I cinch down my crampons, grab a safety harness and some double-layer gloves, and am off again. Neverest, here I come. I wave toward a fading light in the window of my self-support. Always leave a light on. A light on to make it back.
A light for the life of my death.
Ascending too quickly. That’s a common way to die on Neverest. High-speed ascension wipes out great grand plans like a reality avalanche. Massive, audacious, Big Swinging Wit projects that will boggle the brain and defy logic, and oh, if I pull this one off the view will be incredible….
Nope. Dead.
Too much, too fast. All the thought and none of the step back and assess and figure it out. Sometimes the “flash the route” method works. The sudden rush of a brain starved of oxygen and refusing supplemental will squeeze out an icy jewel that glints in the rarest of air at the top of my world.
Behold!
But more often than not, the start-to-finish, full throttle, no thinking of it makes me lose consciousness at my desk and my oxygen-deprived rag doll of a head slams into my keyboard. I respawn to discover I’ve dribbled all over it and that the dribble has frozen into the shape of… what exactly?
What does failure look like? Is this—a frozen dribble monster—it?
I’ve never been good at Rorschach tests. If Neverest symbolizes my brain, it is obvious that at times my brain doesn’t want me in it, let alone on it. Off the mountain with you! Here, have a frozen yak. (I think it’s a yak?)
Shame. I take a deep gulp of air into my damaged lungs and sit up, peeling a Post-It off my cheek. I don’t know how long I was out for. Doesn’t matter.
I note my death in the ledger.
Do the crossword.
I assemble a new expedition.
Should I get a permit this time? The window opens in five, four, three…
Base Camp deaths are the worst. So human. So humble. So predictable. Everyone gathers at Base Camp. Everyone. This is your competition in that race to the summit.
Look around. I am shiny. They are shiny. We are all shiny at the start. Fresh-faced and optimistic. Who will get there first? All our gear is the same. Nice and puffy. No holes. Branded with the smell of idiocy and bravado. It would be exciting if it weren’t all so… same-same.
How will my idea be different than their idea? How will I differentiate my ascent? Oh no, the realization takes hold—everyone has the same idea! This is a Danger Zone. A confidence crevasse. Nausea sets in. I panic at defining what originality is, and it doesn’t matter anyway because I don’t have it and I will need it for what’s ahead.
Neverest wins again.
I shit myself.
I have died here. I have died here many times—at Base Camp—of Confidence Gastro. I vomit ideas into the garbage pile in an effort to settle on just one. Just one original idea that will get me there. That will sustain me for the long haul. Vomit. Hurl. Expel. The base of the mountain becomes a trash heap that’s reported on with scorn in the global tissues, along with my next death notice.
This is Acute Starting Sickness. My molecules are twice as far apart at the start. Splitting off and looking for a way. They might as well be divorced, the way they’re not talking to each other.
Do I really want to do this? Pursue this? Put myself through this? I give up before I even start, pondering these eternal questions of Neverest.
I die.
Back I go. Back through life. Back to the egg.
I crack the shell of the egg with my ice axe and begin again.
On any Neverest between Base Camp and Camp 1 lies the icefall of my brain. It creaks and groans and decides my fate at random. There is no logic and many ways to die here.
Once, I looked deep into the eyes of a crevasse, mesmerized by the potential of what lay in the inky blue black of its welcome. It pulled me in—I have no recollection of falling, just the sense of being sucked into a vortex. I still haven’t hit the bottom.
Falls are deadly. Off the idea, into the idea, away from the edge of the idea. Flailing helplessly, I throw my ice axe at the face of it but into the void I go. A helpless being in too many layers squinting at seracs retreating from view.
No one will find my body, but I know where it is. I will recover it wordlessly and quietly in the sleeping hours of a soul. A vapor in the atmosphere. I will feel it as it reenters through a backdoor in my dreams, nodding sheepishly at me as it does.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” it says. I hear the sound of a pen scratching on brain paper, the beginnings of my death notice.
“Writer Fails—Yet Again!—on Neverest. Novel Left for Dead in the Ice.”
Sometimes you fall into the ice. Sometimes the ice falls on you. Either way, the freeze shrinks your brain into its underwear.
Now there’s another death that creeps up on you.
When it’s not shrinking from the cold, my brain is swelling. Too big a thought, barely contained, and the farther it gets along the route to—what even is the summit? Financial success? Adoration? A phew sound?—doesn’t matter. My brain is so caught up in the frenzy of the pursuit that it swells to a size my walnut skull struggles to contain.
This oozing, swelling, and bubbling out of motivation and confidence is not compatible with life. Will not sustain the life of this project. It dies and so do I. There is a chance it can be saved by backtracking before the swell becomes too much. To go back to a lower, easier point and reassess the situation. But most times, I confess, I just die here with my swollen brain and my boots still on, ripping at garments at my neck. It’s so hot!
“Authorities refuse to recover idea due to cost.”
A correction in the paper this time. It’s not the cost you understand, it’s the commitment. The time commitment. The heart commitment. The soul commitment.
I thought you knew how to speak mountain?
I do. But Neverest is not the voice of the mountain, nor is it the finding your way up the mountain. It is not the task of the mountain at hand.
Mountains teach you how to speak.
Neverest teaches you how to persist.
The Neverest is the continual start, attempt, and completion of.
Neverest is process.
The expedition.
The do of the climb.
The fall. The death.
The respawn at the next Neverest.
And it’s one big Death Zone. An inhospitable environment that requires commitment. All through the ascent, even as you are listening for its message, your body is in a continuous state of breaking down.
Motivation. Confidence. Courage. Corruption of thought. None of these heal right as you continue higher, and after a spell, you go blind with the trying. You cannot see your way out of it or forward or toward the top of this Neverest, but still, you push and push and push with irrational pride that you can do this, that you’ve come too far to turn back now.
All logic is flung away from the step. That’s when you die. It is done. You are done. You die holding the hand of your idea to respawn at the return key of your keyboard.
If it sounds depressing, I don’t mean it to. When a Neverest calls, we must answer. The death of a project is not always a failure because the things you learn from each attempt are invaluable. The things you learn from each success, too.
Because there are successful summit bids. You will stand at the top with a view of your world that is ecstatic and glorious, and you will flush with epinephrine and dopamine and be changed forever by this experience. Of reaching the summit. But even with that comes the risk of death. Of lingering too long with your victory and delaying your next mission.
You must come down to go up again.
Remember this:
On Neverest, nothing ever dies and nothing never dies.
That’s the beauty.
That’s the draw.
That’s the mystique.
How do you climb Neverest?
The same way you climb Everest.
Very, very carefully.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇
This week’s amends…
"When I write...I rarely do second drafts. I’ll do a second draft just to clean up typos and maybe a little shift in the structure, but I’ve always been attracted to the way that people who don’t know how to draw, draw. Their energy is so direct between the pencil and the paper and it’s not cluttered with bullshit style. I feel the more drafts you put writing through, the more you repainted the same painting, all the blood was taken out. It no longer had life in it. Anyway, I wrote this thing really fast."- David Wojnarowicz
On Rotation: “The Wheel” by SOHN
These paper birds, made by artist Sarah Suplina, are in a word, epic. Each one takes six to ten hours to complete. Read more about her process (and see more examples) in this post from This is Colossal.
Another gem from There I Ruined It.
Via Kottke
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple