Rock climbing, flow states, and Apple’s OS X Yosemite

Today marks my 45th birthday.

Yesterday, 22 years ago, I found myself 3000 feet above Yosemite Valley, ascending the last 100 feet of El Capitan’s famous “big wall climb”, The Nose. My climbing partners, William Okin (my best friend from birth),Billy McCullough (well before he opened the famed Tahoe restaurant Dragonfly), and I had been living on the rock for 5 days.  The sun had already set a few hours before and we’d been climbing by headlamp. William and Billy had already summited.  Now it was my turn to climb the last pitch.  Just as I started, a waining moon rose to the east, illuminating that last 100 feet.  The air was still, the silence immense, and the space below me a monocromatic void of blackness.  And since the last pitch was overhanding, and since my other two partners had first lead that pitch, then cleaned the gear, I found myself twirling out in space, inching my way up an 11 mm rope, watching my shadow being cast on the white granite wall, 15 feet to the west.

I arrived at the top and went to sleep jubilant and exausted.  I awoke at sunrise the next morning and celebrated my 23rd birthday.

Today, in this video, using Apple’s OS X Yosemite’s gorgeous desk top images, I want to call out what I love most about creativity, and articulate what I learned about creativity through my experiences as a rock climber: the blissful feeling of total connection and the felt-sense of meaning that courses through you when you find yourself in a flow state.