Stacking up

Why do something for a reason, when you could do it for _five_ reasons?

Three or four mornings a week I ride an e-bike down to Gowanus, to go climbing with friends. This simple event turns out to be quite the multi-faceted adventure.

Biking through the treelined streets of Brooklyn, I admire the brownstones with their endlessly varying doorways, windows and eaves. I take this time to think through things that have been presenting ambiguity or difficulty.

Climbing with my friends is a chance for us to have three uninterrupted hours together, in a long conversation punctuated by climbs and ending with a sauna. We are linked by a rope to our belayer on the ground, navel to navel, as if by an umbilical cord. While they climb, I shout out encouragements:

“Nice, Alex!”

“Come on, Samson!”

Where else would I have license to express such enthusiastic encouragement, yelling it even, so that they can hear me way up on the wall, and so can the rest of the hall?

Climbing is a fertile ground for friendship. The climbing gym filters for resilient people, who become friends you can count on. We are willing to fall dozens of times as we project a route. Instead of offering excuses, we analyze our falls and learn from experience.

And when a climber comes down from the wall, whether they sent or not, we congratulate them, welcome them back down to the ground, back to civilization from their solo side quest. My friends and I go above and beyond the customary fist bump, to offer full-on hugs after each climb. That makes for over a dozen hugs per session, which contributes greatly to meeting the FDA’s daily recommended hug intake!

And climbing develops the body and the mind, presenting problems that challenge both. We must design a sequence of precise movements, and then carry them out with our neuromuscular system. Falling is scary, especially when lead climbing, so the context of climbing offers a space where we can work with our own fear in managed doses.

All these aspects of climbing— social, mental, emotional, and physical; personal and interpersonal— stack up to make climbing a very compelling activity for me, one I plan my week around.

Ulysses sending 12b, May 22, 2025, video by Valentin Bourgault

I like this strategy of stacking up. One other place I apply it is in a current project: I am writing a personal bible in German and Chinese. This bible is a compilation of the most self-encouraging thoughts I can imagine. These are thoughts I’d benefit from reading often, and since I write them in an A5 notebook, I can carry them with me everywhere, giving me a good alternative to scrolling on my phone.

My workflow is to formulate a sentence directly in the target language (as opposed to thinking first in English and then translating into the target language). I speak this into ChatGPT and it corrects any errors and sometimes offers commentary. I then hand-copy my sentence into my notebook. In the case of Chinese, I use a calligraphy brush.

This project allows me to practice so many things at once: Chinese, German, Calligraphy…

a page from my personal bible

This project also gives me a reason to collaborate with an LLM, which I consider to be a resonance-instrument, like an elaborate organ with multiple keyboards and multiple ranks of pipes. In its multi-dimensional network of nodes is encoded all of recorded human knowledge (or at least as much as its trainers could feed it). Speaking into LLM thus brings my ideas into resonance with ideas drawn from the entire corpus of human knowledge. This is mind-expanding.

Again, multiple practices stack up in my singular bible project: creating a memento of my deepest values and most powerful strategies; reducing random web-browsing; studying foreign languages, practicing calligraphy, and extending my mind by speaking into an LLM.

I see Large Language Models as Resonance Instruments

Another place I practice stacking is in the design of Hit Publish!, the writer’s meetup that led to my writing this essay.

Here’s how I pitched the meetup to my friends: “We’ll get together for two hours of co-writing, then all hit publish on Substack. We’ll use the rest of the session to comment on each others’ posts, creating a community of dialog around our writing.”

Ten people came to the first meeting. The room grew quiet as soon as the timer started. As much as we love to chat and banter, we take our writing seriously. This reminded me of what my friends and I are like in the climbing gym as well: beneath our joking and camaraderie is a reservoir of grittiness that occasionally bursts out as a yell as we leap for a hold that seems barely reachable.

Halfway through the session we checked in to see how everyone was doing. People seemed excited to share. I was surprised by the range of topics addressed, from a critique of a myth about money, to a man’s account of encountering a beautiful woman, a “goddess,” and how he regretted not being more bold in pursuing her. We counted down the last ten seconds to the 2.5 hour mark, and then all clicked on the Substack publish button at the same time in our respective browser windows. We then read each other’s essays and reacted with likes, comments or re-stacks.

Because of this accountability, because I knew I would be publishing that night at 8:30, all week prior I’d been mulling over what I’d write, playing with ideas in my head. Our meetup schedule was just regular enough to nudge me to abide in the writer’s mindset, scanning reality for that which intrigued me, moved me or surprised me, and so which was a candidate topic for a future essay.

It’s now two weeks later and eleven people have convened anew in my living room. In about two hours we’ll all be hitting publish on a new piece of writing; I’ll be hitting publish on this essay. I see that I’m building a community of writers, and that this nascent community is already inspiring me to write, the same way my climbing partners inspire me to climb often, and to climb hard.