A few years ago, I was photographing stars from an ice cave on Mount Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. Perched on the side of the mountain in the pitch black, the ice cave had begun shaking vigorously as the winds increased to over 150 kilometres per hour and came rattling down the ridge.
Not one to lose my cool easily, my mind was racing through possibilities. My instinct was to leave the treacherous ice cave and make for safety lower down the mountain — even though my training told me this would be the worst thing to do.
Instead, I radioed my friend Nick, an experienced alpine guide who was based in the hut a few hundred metres below, and described this bizarre and terrifying sensation to him. Nick seemed unruffled and reassured me this was normal.
I spent the rest of the night photographing, battling the wind, scared shitless that my ice cave would collapse off the side of the mountain. But Nick’s calm demeanour had put me at ease that it was nothing to worry about.
Back in the village the next day, I was able to debrief properly with Nick. To my horror, his calm assurance faded as he realised he had misheard me over the radio. Wind so strong it caused solid ice and rock to bounce and shudder? He’d never heard of or experienced it in his life — there had been some crossed wires in our conversation up on the mountain. We stared at each other in silence.
This experience got me thinking about how fickle our states of mind are. Moment to moment, we are taking in pieces of information and letting them dictate our mood, our sense of safety and fear. We live at the whim of these nuggets of information. This tendency can help us — like when your mountain guide tells us there’s no need to worry about being crushed to death by an ice cave. Or when your child doesn’t want to eat and is told the broccoli has magic properties. But it can also harm us. I think about how polarising social media headlines can be, our obsession refreshing of our newsfeeds.
So how do we keep a steady mind?
When Nick and I looked across the table at each other in the chilling realisation that I hadn’t been as safe as he’d thought, I was grateful in that moment for the miscommunication. It had given me the peace of mind to continue the task of photographing I had come for.
Reflecting on this now, I think about how often, in situations we cannot control, we allow external pieces of information to flick the switch between our fear and our calm. And how our peace of mind may be just one calm friend away. To paraphrase Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic, “in the midst of chaos, calm is contagious.”