Psych-Out

In 1974, Philippe Petit stepped out of the ordinary and onto a tightrope that he’d secured between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. 200 feet of empty space from tower to tower. 110 stories up. No net. No harness. 6 years of planning. 6 years of patience, risk, setbacks, and heartaches. All for over an hour of daring.

As for the onlookers below? They, too, had been shaken out of their ordinary worlds as they watched the man dancing on the tightrope more than a quarter of a mile above their heads. “Is he crazy?” Who wouldn’t have asked it? “Of course…he has to be!” Still, no one could deny it was 45 minutes of awe — of beauty.

“Why? Why? Why did you do it?” he was asked over and over. Was it his childhood? An absent parent? Toilet training? Was he thumbing his nose at authority? Was he a harmless sociopath? Did he harbor a death wish? We had to have an explanation.

“There is no ‘why’,” he answered. Philippe Petit refused to cut it to pieces. He refused to make it easy to figure for the rest of us who choose to live on life’s sideline.

We are questioners. We are storytellers. When something strikes us as out of the ordinary, we are compelled by over two hundred thousand years of evolutionary history to fill what we can’t understand with a story. We are driven by a desire to make sense of our world, to reduce it to a single idea so that we can make life’s absurdities comprehensible.

The stories we tell will bring us comfort. Our world will seem less uncertain — more predictable. We will come up with that one answer that explains to us what on the surface may appear to be crazy. We will take the extraordinary and make it seem to be ordinary by bringing it to a predictable formula. The story doesn’t have to be accurate, only that we believe it to be so.

Jon Krakauer wrote, “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation…”

You wake up every morning at 7. Get to work by 9. Eat lunch at noon. Come home at 6. Plant yourself in front of the TV or computer screen until you fall asleep — then, the next day, and the next day after that for months and years, do it all over again. You will owe the world no explanation. And no one will think to ask you why.

But what if you decide to go backpacking in Nepal for a year, or spike your hair and join a rock n roll band, or suddenly take up comedy improvisation, or string a tightrope between two towers and walk from one end to another? The question will start to roll. Why? Why? Give us an explanation, please?

We all take comfort in the story of Sisyphus who was doomed to an eternity of rolling that rock up the hill day in and day out, only to have it roll back down. We take comfort in it, even as we curse it as our own fate. Sisyphus had no doubt what his eternity of tomorrows would bring. How many ideas do we nip at the bud because they seem to ourselves, our friends, and our families to be just a little crazy, or that they may bring that dreaded uncertainty to everyone’s life.

Unlike that cursed son of a king, we can even for a moment each day, week, or month of our lives step out from behind that rock.

Change a routine. Break from the chains of our predictable day to day. To be able to wake up to a day of uncertainty may be cause for our greatest anxiety — yet it can also open some door to our greatest joy.

As Philippe Petit said, “Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge, and then you live your life on a tightrope.”