Endurance: an ongoing stumble against prevailing headwinds

Watch a community flourish with When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà

Reading this book feels like standing in a high mountain valley, narrow and hemmed in by crags. Talk, and the words will bounce back and forth between the peaks, echoing and subtly shifting. Mornings, fog covers the valley floor, making it difficult to see clearly. You’ll hear a cowbell in the mist, seeming no more than an arm’s length away. You’ll hear the chapel bell and the larks; you’ll smell a bear or feel the need to slide into a tooth-crackingly cold creek. When the storms come, your hair will stand on end with electric energy. 

When Sió lost her marbles, my husband said that sometimes, to survive, you have to throw dirt on the memories, but those who’ve suffered too much always throw on too much dirt. Agustí thinks a lot about our town history. He searches for the why behind things. Analyzes it. That’s his way of finding peace. Understanding things, people. But not everything can be understood, my dear.

Catalan writer Irene Solà has crafted a polyphonal soundscape of a novel, everyone talking in turn or at once, giving different perspectives in different time frames. It’s a collage and a kaleidoscope of an approach that asks you to sift its sentences for clues while also savoring the richness of the unfolding impressions. Close-knit as communities are, it’s still impossible to know everything, and sticking with a single perspective does present certain limitations. Writers like Solà can step into that narrative gap, however, and hand us a multi-vocal bouquet of brilliant perspectives.

What emerges as you read this novel is a blurry, crinkled, portrayal of endurance. We begin with a poet who is trying to put his words in better order, only to be felled by a lightning strike. The rain falling around the lightning nourishes the mushrooms he was gathering and trickles into the streams that hydrate the village, even as his small, individual death will set off grief ripples throughout the community. 

So you’ll find the persistence of human desires, along with the lasting struggle to achieve balance. Some adults want to leave the Spanish Civil war far behind them; some children want to glory in the excitement of gathering up spent grenades. Hunters and herders keep their rhythms; hearts quietly surge and subside; hopes and dreams are folded and stored away even as new ones sprout. Solà portrays individual, community, and natural endurance as a rhythm, not unlike the rhythms of rain, of grief, and of growth.

Where’s the bibliography?

Solà’s pastiche style leaves breathing room for the reader to stitch together clues and gather up insights (not unlike gathering mushrooms). Follow the trajectory of Jaume, for example, the gigantic, clumsy-seeming friend who collapses his friends’ emotional world in a wrenching accident. Many of us are met with life-cracking grief and guilt, and many of us retreat, as Jaume does, into blank silence. Solà doesn’t let his griefwork end there though, and if you, too have been trying to carry grief for too long, you may appreciate how Jaume finds a way through it. 

“Here, throw them all away, all the things you’ve ever desired, toss them into the road, into some ditch, the things you used to think. The things you loved. And look how paltry, how measly they were. That man and that mountain. They make a woman want a small life. A runty life like a pretty little pebble. A life that can fit in your pocket. Like a ring, or a hazelnut. They don’t tell a woman she can choose things that aren’t small.”

Many other such examples stud this book. You could take the big picture view, observing how individual cares and concerns lose prominence in the greater overall narrative. Perhaps it’s comforting, for example, to compare human sorrows against the slow crumbling of an entire mountain range. Conversely, you could focus on the bright introspection almost every character (even the dogs) display. In this community, individuals are keenly alive to tiny shifts and differences. Maybe this kind of awareness would be welcome in your own life?

A little more

• This book reminded me of Max Porter’s work, specifically his fascinatingly poetic and visceral novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, wherein grief, for a while, is embodied as a crow. It wasn’t surprising to find that Porter has blurbed Solà’s book: “When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving.”
• For a tinier taste of Solà, you could read an excerpt from a different book, as published in Granta 
• Here Solà talks with Yasnaya Elena Aguilar about writing and more as part of the Hay Festival’s offerings 

Virginal Woolf’s work often deals with endurance, both enduring existential rubs as well as enduring (and enjoying) the passing of a single day. To the Lighthouse would make for an excellent follow-on fiction read, or you could read Kapka Kasabova’s nonfiction account of Balkan village life in Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time.

Get breathless with Into Thin Air by John Krakauer

Ready for something chillingly grouchy and trenchantly icy? By now Krakauer has become a widely-read writer who has racked up multiple awards and film deals. Into Thin Air, one of his earliest books, sees him hacking out footholds for his trademark no-nonsense pragmatism and eloquent refusal to suffer fools.

“Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.”

Here he tells the story of how he was persuaded to join an ill-fated climbing group and how everything went sideways one day on a mountain with no mercy or margin for error. Anxious to reveal how “bagging Everest” has become, in his opinion, a perilous pay-to-play endeavor catering to bucket listers while also kicking them to the existential curb, Krakauer’s disgust for glamorized climbing is honed sharp. Should “just anyone” be permitted to climb? Should money secure access to one of the world’s great wonders? And how does money blind both businesses and climbers to danger? 

It’s easy to charge at a mountain, but much more difficult to cultivate moral sensitivity once on it, he hints. When the peak beckons and the oxygen gets thin, people’s judgment can lapse, sometimes catastrophically. They can lose sight of how small and fragile humans are in the face of a storm and thousands of feet of rock. Perhaps it’s a stretch to apply mountaineering insights to everyday life, but I think not. In fact, mountaineering offers a kind of moral shorthand that can help us understand how we function under pressure and how, literally or metaphorically, we become willing to step over dying compatriots to stand for a few shivering moments at the ceiling of the world.

“We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality”

When offered the opportunity to pay our way to Everest, to a lion’s pelt, to 10,000 followers, many of us do. We make trophies of these endeavors and can easily forget as we go how possible it is to hurt ourselves and others along the way. Our propensity to chase a feeling of achievement endures. Why do we need such a tangible achievement to feel better about ourselves? 

It’s not that simple, of course, and Krakauer delves into the lure of grand mountains and big attempts even as he criticizes how easy it becomes to get swept up in a big quest. Our sense of adventure endures, it seems, along with our greediness for acclaim or our need to reassure ourselves we can accomplish difficult feats. Indeed, the physical grit and endurance on display here is in and of itself impressive. What strikes me more, however, is Krakauer’s call to take responsibility for the passions that drive us. Sometimes the most impressive feat we can accomplish, I’m starting to think, is learning to endure ourselves and what we have done and continue to do.

Where’s the bibliography?

Here I spot Krakauer wrestling with what some researchers call moral hazard, which, essentially, occurs when a situation forces you to compromise morals you thought you would never betray. Most of us would not callously step over a classmate or colleague who has just tripped and injured themselves, yet, as Krakauer documents, when pushed beyond limits of tiredness and cognitive functioning, we find ourselves unable to rise to our better selves. 

When we get stressed, the world can often seem to narrow to very specific and individualistic concerns. It doesn’t feel as though we have the bandwidth to pay attention to anything else. Perhaps you’ve experienced this, finding yourself unable to scrounge up the desire to drop a quarter in a homeless person’s begging cup after a stressful work day, or struggling to offer a close friend support when you feel so worn thin yourself?

“This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die.”

Moral hazard is a distressing place to be, and can lead to PTSD, biting regret, and feeling stuck in place. Regrets pile up like uncontrolled Tetris blocks; you may feel scattered and confused, unsure of who you actually are and feeling as though you have somehow betrayed yourself and your ideas. 

To deal with moral hazard, it helps to buffer stress as much as possible. Venture too far into self care and you can risk becoming inured to others’ needs and struggles, but that said, you will want a basic foundation of stability and supportiveness toward yourself. If that’s an area of struggle, you may want to explore *. When you feel gripped by a situation like Krakauer’s, whether literally or metaphorically, you need to check in with your moral compass more frequently, just as you also need to pace yourself. You can’t afford to push yourself up to the electric fence of your own limits. Finally, you can practice techniques such as * to cope with the impacts of moral hazard.

A little more

• Not all climbers see eye-to-eye with Krakauer’s telling. For an alternate take on what happened during that deadly storm, try The Climb by * Boukreev or Left for Dead by Beck Weathers
• For one of the most chilling testaments to full-hearted endurance I’ve yet encountered, read Miracle in the Andes
• The often-overlooked heroes of Everest–and of many other Himalayan peaks–are Nepal’s Sherpas. Read more about their astounding endurance in Two Sherpas, a fictional account of two sherpas surveying a fallen Englishman while keeping other things in mind, or pick a nonfiction account of two sherpas who survived one of Everest’s most vicious days in Buried in the Sky
• For sheer physicality, few measure up to Gurka soldier and mountaineer extraordinaire “Nims” Purja, whose recent book, Beyond Possible, impresses as few other mountaineering books do
• Sample another Krakauer book, such Into the Wild, with its themes of challenge, self-exploration and perhaps foolhardy recklessness

Want more about mountain rescues, companionship, and muddy grit? Read Bree Loewen’s memoir, Found, about being a search and rescue volunteer in the Cascades of Washington state

Hang in there with Endure by Alex Hutchinson

This selection heads straight into the most literal interpretation of endurance: that of accomplishing physical feats. For runner and writer Hutchinson, that involves a detailed run-down of how humans perform at their limits. Most of us would think right away about muscle fibers or lung capacity, about training techniques or eating lean. 

“A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.”

Hutchinson, however, delves into the psychological side of physical endurance. In broad terms, he points out how we can push far past pain thresholds, exhaustion, and more, using powerful mental strategies combined with practice. Mental endurance, Hutchinson finds, enables consistent performance, and can be built as we get used to how to interpret and manage signals of tiredness, stress, discomfort, and more. These tools are not merely for elite athletes, but are applicable for much of modern life, where we’re often encouraged to seek comfort and rush to alleviate any degree of discomfort. That, however, renders us very sensitive to the exterior world, and risks us becoming thin-skinned and touchy, subject to every passing emotional breeze and insecure about our abilities to persevere through difficult challenges. Leveraging mental performance techniques helps with everyday life, Hutchinson suggests, boosting our ability to withstand daily frustrations. Much of it, according to him, is about energy management and pacing.

For me, much of this book’s pleasure came from the little details, such as insights into laboratory experiments or anecdotes of how it’s possible to swim or run far longer than you thought you ever could – if you need to. That’s the hinge that separates exceptional performance, for me, from how most of us physically and mentally coast when we can. When life demands exceptional feats from us, many of us can rise to the challenge, even without understanding how (we would probably do better if we did have a hint of how to persevere, following Hutchinson’s findings). When everyday tasks don’t demand this degree of exceptionalism from us, however, we don’t always try to push our limits. So for me, the question becomes: should we pus harder, because we can? Should we peg our performance to discrete feats, taking satisfaction from being clearly able to measure and track progress? Or should we find consistent ways to fold small, helpful habits into our daily routines? It could boil down to Michael Joyner’s advice, which Hutchinson quotes: 

“Run a lot of miles 

Some faster than your race pace 

Rest once in a while”

Where’s the bibliography?

I’m not a runner, and I’m not likely to try to set any endurance records. I did find myself inspired, however, by realizing my mind and body can do far more than I am consciously aware. In Western societies, I think, we still often adhere to a Cartesian, “split” version of ourselves, the mind on one side, the body on the other. Keeping mental health consigned to a different style of healthcare than “general” health doesn’t help with this. We are much more intertwined than that, however, with the gut, for example, strongly influencing what our mind feels, and with our mind, as Hutchinson shows, capable of altering what we experience in our body. 

By working on mental fortitude, we can reap rewards in multiple parts of life, finding more of a mental equanimity, digging deep to push through problems when we need to, managing acceptance and flexibility when sheer grinding won’t work, and learning how to use positive framing to support ourselves even in grimly frustrating circumstances. 

It’s not all roses. It’s also better than having few mental tools or techniques at all. For a starting point with building mental fortitude: *site. You could also:

• Practice “Rainbow Grounding” when you’re feeling emotionally flooded or overwhelmed. Simply start to find colors around you when you’re feeling pushed too hard, following the order of the rainbow. All red objects, all orange objects, etc. It may sound simple, but it’s powerful because it diverts your mind onto a different attentional pathway. Suddenly you’re more absorbed in observing color than you are paying attention to your rising, paralyzing anxiety, frustration, or rage.
• Take a page from Nims Purja, the Gurkha soldier and mountaineer from Nepal, and fix the image of one of your favorite and most loved friends or relatives in your mind when you’re struggling. What could you accomplish, if it was for this person instead of yourself? If a loved one’s face doesn’t provide enough inspiration, focus on making an effort for a larger group instead of yourself. Nims, for example, was able to climb harder and faster when he told himself he was doing it to honor the brotherhood of Gurkha soldiers. That gave him a larger identity, relieved the pressure of trying to “selfishly” accomplish things only for himself, and helped him feel less lonely in his endeavors. For you, would your larger group be people who share your professional discipline, like scientists? Churchgoers? Fellow readers? Others who are lonely? When we remind ourselves we belong to larger groups, we can feel more supported, energetic, and resilient.  

Just as part of building physical endurance involves learning to manage pain, building mental and emotional endurance requires becoming more tolerant of mental and emotional stress and discomfort. There are many techniques for doing that, such as *book, but tips such as these offer a good jumping-off point.

A little more

• More physical prowess is on display in Netflix’s documentary show, Unchained: Tour de France
• Jennifer Pharr Davis writes about setting speed and endurance records on some of the world’s most challenging hiking trails in The Pursuit of Endurance
• Novelists can be runners, too, as Haruki Murakami addresses in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Consider truly lasting things with Uranium by Tom Zoellner

Being human can be a perplexing state of affairs. Life is so short – how can we cram in all our ambitions, our dreams? How will we feel about the things we never accomplish, the experiences that never quite unfold, the desires that, no matter how patient we are and how hard we try, are never satisfied? Endurance seems to have a limit. Despite how mindful, positive, patient, and persistent we are, we have to wrap things up and die.
Imagine, however, lasting eon after eon. Imagine time on a geological scale, free from the existential crimp of a human’s paltry eighty years. The mountains help us contextualize our own lives, as do the minerals and elements that really last. Endurance, in this context, takes on a different meaning. In the case of uranium, one of the longest-lasting elements, that’s powerful, volatile, and dangerous meaning we’re still grappling to comprehend.

Uranium’s story, as you might suspect, is fraught. With Zoellner explaining it, it’s also fascinating. Uranium is a substance we fear but also try to wield as best we can. That makes it both enduringly compelling and stubbornly troubling. Uranium’s longevity and potential forces us toward difficult questions. Should we use something so powerful for war, or even as a threat? Can we managing the literal fallout of relying on it as an energy source? What about disasters, which can occur on a scale beyond our imagining, and with repercussions that can last generations? Even the problem of storing nuclear waste is thorny. Clearly, with uranium, the power and energy we crave comes with very high costs, and we have to contemplate whether it’s acceptable to push these costs into the future, hoping our children and grandchildren will prove equal to paying our energy debts and caging our radioactive waste, or whether we should abstain altogether or be more patient in our drive to harness such a potentially explosive element. 

Readers who relish delicious little details will find a rich smorgasbord in this book. It could become difficult to stop spouting fascinating facts, for uranium’s story is better than a typical thriller, more twisty and improbable, and more loaded with weighty questions than most books on philosophy.

Where’s the bibliography?

While it’s normal to be caught up in the everyday back-and-forth of life, I think it’s helpful to lift our heads once in a while and take a broader view. Zoellner’s book helps us do that because it focuses our attention on how this single element has shaped our collective history and continues to compel us to make difficult decisions. Uranium, like life, is simply not easy. 

Perhaps it’s too simple a metaphor, to draw life lessons from an element, but for me, it’s useful to remember that grasping for power in the moment can, over time, drastically change one’s personality and whole relationship to society. Gestures and acts that seem small on the surface, whether positive or negative, can reverberate throughout time. We are not exactly as god-like as uranium makes us feel, but nonetheless, much of what we do and choose is going to outlast us. Keeping that in mind can help us choose life paths and guide us through even apparently trivial decisions.

A little more

• Find out more about Marie Curie’s groundbreaking work with uranium and how the element continues to support cancer treatments today
• Learn about the US’s Manhattan project and its accompanying ethical questions
• Uranium isn’t the only controversial energy source in town…find out about the Haber-Bosch process and how it both fed and killed millions, told rivetingly well in Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air
• Dig into the unsettling details of storing nuclear waste

Marvel at the awful limits of endurance in The Welsh Fasting Girl by Varley O’Connor

This is the kind of book I have trouble resisting. It’s fiction but it is based on the UK “fasting girl” phenomenon of the late 1800s, when young girls and women would claim to be subsisting on nothing more than air or sunlight and prayer. It’s an improbable claim, but nevertheless served to help the church cling to power in rural areas that were quickly losing their young people to cities. 

In this case, narrator Sarah Jacob is only 12, but shoulders a huge burden for her family and community in holding fast to her apparently miraculous ability to survive without food. There’s an unsettling, near delicious claustrophobia to this novel–and I mean this in a good way–as if the walls are inching forward at the same rate flesh is melting off the narrator’s bones. It’s a visceral feeling that climbs into the marrow.

Seen from one perspective, this is a story about early anorexia and how people learn to harm themselves to procure power. From a different perspective, it’s about pressure and expectations, about rural poverty, waning religious influence, and the urge to believe in inexplicable things. It’s a novel where symbols are deeply meaningful and the quest to discover “what’s really going on” leads not to clarity but to increasingly labyrinthine human motivations. 

In measured, deliberate prose, O’Connor packs in a lot. You feel the reverberating isolation of the Welsh countryside; you feel the blurry interpersonal dynamics that make up a family. You feel the haunting nature of Sarah’s fate as it slowly, agonizingly unfolds and you feel the horror of bystanders unable to untangle the knots of human psychology at play. The fact that these events actually played out is all the more unsettling. 

For me, the novel is thematically about endurance–the endurance of an intolerable situation, at least–as well as about how difficult it can be for a community’s cultural values to change.

Where’s the bibliography?

Yes, Sarah’s story is a captivating one that pulls the reader straight into the treacly depths of the human desire to remain loyal. What compels me even more, however, is how vividly O’Connor illustrates the bystander effect. That’s when we choose not to act, even in an apparent emergency, because no one else is acting. We feel lulled into inaction. Someone else will take care of it, or, since no one else is reacting, it must not be important. In both public and private life, adherence to “minding your own business” and a refusal to become involved with clearly troublesome matters can lead to terrible places. 

As O’Connor, shows, family dynamics and community pressures can interact, demanding tacit compliance in what is often claimed to be a greater goal. I saw this effect occur in a church my family used to attend, when, to avoid awkwardness and the process of questioning a religious leader, the congregation chose not to address clear instances of abuse. Just because rules and norms are not voiced out loud or put to a vote does not mean they are easy to break – indeed, they can be all the more powerful in their vagueness and ambiguities. Their very slipperiness makes them difficult to bring up. Over time, everyone’s silent acceptance enables these troubling norms, turning them into habits. 

Often, a single individual or marginalized group pays the price. A family may chose a child to be the problematic “black sheep” upon whom they can blame their problems. Everyone else in the family may feel a bit better, but the “black sheep” is usually forced to deal with unjust levels of rejection, condemnation, and punishment. If that has happened to you, you may want to look into treatments and therapies that account for damaging family dynamics.

If a book like O’Connors disturbs you, it may be helpful to ask what toxic, unchallenged norms might be unfolding in your own family or community. Do you see themes or behaviors that need to be named and addressed in public? Are there scenarios in which you no longer wish to be a bystander? If so, plan for what steps you’ll take next.

A little more

• More about fasting girls from Mental Floss 
• Haven’t had enough of strange historical claims? Read about a the real case of a woman who claimed to birth rabbits in another historical novel, Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
• From an earlier time, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, about a young man starving from poverty and from pursuing his desire to be a writer, still hits a few similar notes