mountain skyline with pretty clouds

Katie Mayo

stoke is my strength

Category: Wonder

  • Feelings vs. Thoughts, outside

    I’m at a point in my life where I’m giving more credence to my feelings, rather than only trusting my brain and dismissing my feelings as invalid. It really bums me out that little kids learn to do that in our society.

    me as a kid, knowing exactly who I was

    This long transformation has felt more like a shattering at times, but it is born out of a realization that I must “return” to myself if I want to feel alright.

    One pervasive feeling in my life the past few years is that being connected to nature is absolutely essential for me to live an embodied, healthy life.

    I have a lot of thoughts about that feeling.

    The most persistent thought is that an affinity to the outdoors and nature is contradictory of my educational and professional background.

    I got an MBA. Aka consumerism-central. My education wants me to focus on dollars, so why am I drawn to something that can’t (and likely shouldn’t) translate into dollars? And can I make these things make sense?

    Am I just on the backswing from the MBA? Naturally swinging the opposite way before correcting somewhere in the middle? Or maybe it’s some kind of personal rebellion against capitalism. But I’m not even at an extreme level of climate-activism, or consumerism, or anything really… I’m somewhere in between, but my mind spins between the extremes.

    Regardless, I’m following my feelings like never before. That’s why I moved into the van. It’s why I centered climbing in my life. It’s why I stay in rural places. And it’s why I’ve gone through 3 moleskine journals in the past year…

    My work

    My career, at least lately, has been focused on doing “good” or at least less worse. I’ve been working in climate tech, teaching yoga, taking photos, and instructing rock climbing.

    And I have been spending more time on “non-productive” activities, such as learning to feel. And working to understand who I am (beyond a nervously tweaky cog in an economy).

    This all feels aligned, but I have thoughts about efficiency and optimizing which feel icky in this context. So I’ve tried to sort out how this all fits/makes sense.

    Once in undergrad, a friend referred to me as a “hilarious contradiction” (an interesting one to translate from Chinese, during my study abroad). And I felt seen.

    As a Systems Engineer, I was trained to understand complex relationships, which worked well because I spent a lifetime studying that in the interpersonal context. So now I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how this hilarious contradiction I call life actually makes total Katie-sense.

    Validity

    Intellectually, I know that doing activities that don’t earn money have value. But it certainly feels like they don’t, at least not to other people. And I really do want to have value in the eyes of other people.

    If I prioritize non-traditional, less lucrative, personal and professional activities, can I live a public life, be valued, belong? If it doesn’t earn me money, does it still have value? Intellectually, the answer is of course.

    But as someone with an ingrained sense that dollar value is an indication of worth…. it feels like those activities are somehow unworthy.

    Maybe I’m just still shedding some old conditioning about working in a proper j-o-b to be valued in society.

    Ultimately, I’m trying to accept that my feelings and my thoughts are both valid. And I’m trying to allow myself to spend life energy on things my brain says are unworthy, but my heart says are essential. To me, this apparent contradiction is not just worth untangling, it’s required.

    The untangling

    So how does all this disparate focus “make sense”? Maybe I have too many tabs open and it doesn’t make sense. Or maybe I’ll only really know a decade or two from now, looking back at it in hindsight.

    So far though, the through lines I have found are: 1) the mind-body connection and 2) the human-nature connection.

    I think there is an under-explored triad there: the mind-body-nature connection. Is this something I can commercialize? Probably not. But I’m trying to internalize it instead.

    I’d categorize this study of the mind-body-nature triad under eco-psychology. I have become something of an amaetur eco-psychologist.

    Human-nature connection

    The human-nature connection is the relationship between people and the natural world. It’s spiritual and soulful, rather than intellectual.

    Recovering from my own dysfunction has led me away from a computer, outside over and over again, feet in the dirt. But no matter how “right” it feels, there is the pull of a computer… the magnetism of doing something others deem worthwhile. And historically for me that has involved a computer.

    But it’s not just a me thing. Numerous studies highlight the importance of the human-nature connection.

    • Walking in a forest barefoot increases serotonin, decreases inflammation (source)
    • Spending 20+ minutes in a natural environment produces measurable reduction in cortisol (source)

    The list goes on. But the defragmentation that occurs outdoors is real in my lived experience.

    This isn’t a particularly radical idea. Humans evolved in relationship with the natural world, and a growing body of research suggests that time in nature improves mood, reduces stress, and supports wellbeing. What surprises me is not that nature helps, but how quickly I notice its absence.

    Mind-body connection

    The mind-body connection is the recognition that our thoughts, emotions, and physical experiences are deeply intertwined. Yoga was my first real introduction to this idea. Before then, if I couldn’t logically justify an emotion, I tried to treat it as irrelevant.

    Over time, I’ve learned that the body often knows things before the mind catches up. Stress shows up in muscles, breath, digestion, sleep, and energy levels. Joy, grief, anxiety, and peace all have physical signatures. The more attention I pay to those signals, the more information I have about what I actually need.

    And research backs it up, from ancient yoga claims being validated to finding gut-brain connections previously ignored:

    • yogic breathing (pranayama) produces beneficial neurocognitive, psychophysiological, respiratory, biochemical and metabolic changes (source)
    • yoga asana (movement) produces a significant increase in mental wellbeing (source)
    • gut microbiota directly affects behavior and mental health (source)

    Also see The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.

    The mind-body-nature connection

    What interests me most isn’t the human-nature connection or the mind-body connection in isolation. It’s the intersection between them.

    And I think it’s obviously all connected: the mind, the physical body, and connection to nature (whether by spending time there, or eating food directly from the earth).

    The closer I am to nature, the easier it becomes to notice what I’m feeling beneath the thinking and the noise of productivity, achievement, and distraction.

    Maybe that’s why so many of the activities that feel essential to me, yoga, climbing, hiking, photography, even living in a van – sit at this intersection.

    They are practices that bring me into relationship with both my internal landscape and the landscape around me. The more I explore that triad of mind, body, and nature, the more it feels less like a hobby and more like a framework for understanding what it means to live well.

  • The carbon footprint of an existential crisis: a climbing roadtrip to find myself

    The carbon footprint of an existential crisis: a climbing roadtrip to find myself

    More than just a climbing dirtbag roadtrip.

    I was laid off earlier this year, along with 60%+ of the company, from a job I enjoyed but found chaotic. The day of the layoff, I added sticky notes to my wall with ideas on what to do. Then I got in the car and drove 5 hours north to Mammoth Lakes, CA to go skiing. I wanted to use the time to be outside, travel, and climb, while I job hunted for another good fit.

    Meanwhile, I still wanted structure and routine. So I built my personal outdoor curriculum: Single Pitch Instructor certification, Wilderness First Responder certification, plus a climate change fellowship with Terra.do.

    I also traveled and climbed. For my first major roadtrip I drove from LA to Texas for an AAC Volunteer Summit at Hueco Tanks Rock Ranch. Then I briefly came back to LA before beginning another road trip to Canada. All in my little 2011 Honda CRV. I built out the back of my car into the coziest car camping setup I could build. I feel very at home there, despite my VA plates indicating that I am quite far from home here on the West Coast.

    Learnings

    There were a lot of ups and downs along the way. And I’m still a little up and a little down about it even after the fact. Regardless, I learned a lot trying to figure out where I fit in, in life, in climbing, and in my career, all while living out of my car. Big takeaways:

    1. I prefer to avoid crowds
    2. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer

    Road trip 1: LA <> Texas

    I wanted to immortalize this time in my car by writing down my experiences as some kind of public diary with the target audience of future me.

    I started with a SW USA roadtrip. And then pretty quickly graduated to an international trip to the great white north to climb in Canada.

    Road trip 2: LA <> Canada

    My trip spanned desert and alpine environments, and I saw (at least) 14 National Parks, 2 National Monuments, 15 National Forests, 2 State Parks, countless wilderness and conservation areas. I truthfully lost count. All this I did in a car that takes 89.

    So is it ironic that I did this at a time when I was diving deeper into climate change? What was my carbon footprint on this trip and was it more or less than my usual apartment life? According to carbonfootprint.com my make/model/year emitted 2.1 metric tons of carbon for the 3 months I lived out of my car (~7,500 miles). Usually, my life emits around 13,148 lbs of CO2 according to the EPA calculator. That’s all inclusive, including my driving/traveling. That means that for 3 months, it would’ve been about 3,287 lbs CO2 if I had stayed home.

    While I’m a bit down that my climate impact was so much greater during the summer roadtrip, I think there is value in learning too. It’s hard to figure out the appropriate tradeoffs – how much personal growth and learning is 1 ton of CO2 worth? And who gets to decide? Of course, I remained committed to some of the individual actions I have already incorporated into my life. That includes: vegetarianism, recycling, using reusable containers, below average consumerism. But this summer’s personal journey also made me keen to get involved on a systemic level. I now make climate a stakeholder in organizational decisions I have the privilege to be part of. I’m doing it imperfectly, but I’m showing up, so I can be optimistic about that.