I spent the weekend perched beneath an outcrop of tasty rock at the edge of a salt flat that stretched out before us over some mind-numbing distance. Islands of rock and rising mountains broke the horizon and provided a sense of perspective. It was a trippy landscape to ponder, especially after a few whacks of whisky and a belly full of red meat.

“Imagine walking across that flat,” I mused to my friend Sam, thinking about the grim prospect of having to hike into a landscape that would provide no sense of progress made or distance yet to be overcome. “You’d lose your mind.”

“There are studies that show that without points of reference, people end up just walking in circles,” Sam said. “You’d be totally fucked.”

This idea immediately captured my imagination. Apparently, it’s true as well. Without any visual reference points, we are unable to walk in a straight line. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics dubbed the phenomenon “lost-hiker deja vu,” and attribute the phenomenon to how our brains are constantly recalibrating our sense of what’s “straight ahead.” This, combined with small deviations in our steps, has the effect of sending us spiraling.

There’s an obvious existential absurdity to our apparent predicament. Headway can be only a mirage rising above a rippled salt flat. I sometimes wonder if true progress is even possible in our lives, or if we’re always just recalibrating our senses of what constitutes “straight ahead.” There’s no shame in falling short in achieving your goals, of course. I’m just curious about how our clever brains deceive us when we redefine what counts as success, giving us a false sense that we are indeed “moving forward.”

It was a humbling weekend of flailing on the rock for me. I experienced the humiliating trauma of hanging from a jug and pulling up the rope two or three times only to drop it when I found myself at the last moment unable to clip because I was too pumped, before finally just grabbing the damn draw. It’s the kind of embarrassment that makes you feel as if you have to apologize to your belayer for taking in and dishing out slack so many times in a row.

My goals as a person and a climber are very different today than they were five or ten years ago. My former self would probably scoff at the lowering of the bar of my own aspirations. And yet, here I am, recalibrating what it means to move forward, even if I am just deceiving myself by making one large, hopeless circle.

Jonathan Siegrist told me recently he gets messages occasionally from climbers wanting to know how to “get better.” His response, he said, is always the same, “Get better at what?” Climbing, they’ll usually say. “No, that’s not good enough,” he’ll reply. “You need a specific goal.”

Well, the brutal work of getting back some fitness lies ahead. Whatever. It’s the early season still. This fall, with one kid on her way to kindergarten and the other off to pre-school, the prospect of having more time than usual to climb has emerged like a distant peak at the edge of a still and vast plateau. Time to circle a new goal and step straight ahead.