In October 2005, I spent two weeks in the Amazon jungle. My father had to go to Brazil to research gold mining operations for his book The Dream Merchant, and there was no way I was going to let my pop disappear into the jungle without me. My buddy Dan took the trip with us because he’d always dreamed of the Amazon. We spent much of the trip 250 kilometers south of Manaus, in an area called Tupana, where the outer reaches of the TransAmazonian Highway, the only connection to civilization, dwindle from a pitted two-lane road into a dirt path, with the forest canopy closing in from all sides until the trees are overhead and engulf what remains of the clearing. Every ten or twenty miles, tiny villages exist virtually untouched by the modern world. In this remote part of Brazil, there is a deep respect for the thin line between life and death. There are no layers of protection such as the ones most of us are used to. No grocery stores, no hospitals, no ambulances or policemen to buffer a bad moment. There is the sense among Amazonians that the jungle sits poised to devour the unwary. No one walks into the forest alone. Most people carry weapons. The danger is too great.
While we lived in the rainforest, a man named Manuel acted as our guide. Manuel is a native Amazonian, born in Tupana, about fifty years old, powerfully built with shining brown eyes and the jungle in his blood. He led us through the dense foliage, quietly pointing out medicinal trees, animal tracks, insects, monkey vines, the signs of the forest. From time to time he would stop, raise a hand. Minutes passed. We stood silent and listened, the air alive with the sound of animals feeding or moving nearby. Manuel carried a shotgun. His friend Marcelo trailed us with another. Cats were always on the mind.
Throughout the trip, Dan and I asked a lot of questions about the jaguar. Walking through the forest at night, we wanted to be prepared for an encounter. We were given spears, which made us feel better. But over and over Manuel shook his head and explained that if a jaguar really wants you, there will not be much fight. It is rare for someone to speak of seeing a jaguar in the forest. If you see one, it’s probably too late. People traveling in groups will, for the most part, be left alone. From time to time, the last person in a procession will be picked off from behind, but cats generally avoid teams. They are stealth hunters. A lone traveler will be moving through the forest, and the cat will be crouched on a limb of an overhanging tree, blending into the forest canopy, listening, waiting. Then the ambush emerges from nowhere, and the cat is on your neck. In Manuel’s descriptions of the jaguar, there seemed to be an almost religious respect for its power, cunning, and intensity. But what if I have a machete? How could I not have a chance?
One evening, lying in hammocks above the forest floor, engulfed by deep blackness and the wild symphony of night sounds, Manuel told us what happened to a friend of his a few years before. This man was named José. He was born in the Amazon. He knew the jungle’s sounds, its smells, its signs. He knew how to heal every conceivable ailment with saps and boiled barks of trees, roots, leaves. He climbed vines like a monkey, hunted every evening with a blowgun and darts laced with the venom of poisonous frogs. José could operate from sound and smell alone, freezing in the dark forest, listening, then shooting his dart into the dusky woods and hitting his mark for his family’s dinner. He was one of the rare ones who ventured into the forest alone. On these evenings, he wore a mask on his head, eyes pointing backward so the cats would not ambush him from behind. His only weapon was his small blowgun and a machete he apparently wielded like a samurai.
One night José was moving through the forest, darkness closing in, on the way home with a small capybara strapped to his back. Suddenly his skin prickled. He stopped, listened, heard the deep rumble of a cat. He smelled the animal, knew it was near. He felt for his blowgun, but it had been a long night hunting and there were no darts left. José was standing next to a giant Sumaumeira tree, which are often used by Amazonians for communicating over long distances in the jungle. Immediately, José took his machete and swung it back and forth in a blur, clanging against the tree’s magnificent exposed root and sending a pounding call for help through the darkness. These vibrations can be heard over a mile away. Hopefully his son would be listening.
Then José stood in silence, waiting. He smelled the cat. It was close. A few moments later a large black jaguar, onza negra, over two hundred pounds, glided down from a tree twenty feet ahead of him and started moving in. José remembered the glowing yellow eyes, as though a demon were coming for him. He knew if he ran the cat would be on him instantly. He tossed his night’s catch forward onto the forest floor, then held his machete and stood his ground, moving his weapon rhythmically, preparing for the fight of his life. The cat walked straight toward him, and then changed course about eight feet away. It started pacing. Back and forth, keeping distance, but never taking its eyes off José. It watched the machete, followed its movements.
At first, the jaguar’s pacing felt good. José thought that maybe it was indecisive, considering the dead rodent. The minutes passed. José’s arm got tired from swaying. He watched the rippling muscles of the cat’s legs, imagined them hurling the beast on top of him. There would be only one chance. When the cat came, he would need to dodge and strike in a blur. He would have to get to the neck or take off a limb and somehow roll away from the razor claws. It would all happen in an instant. But the waiting was eating him up inside. His whole being was on edge, poised for battle, exploding, while the cat paced, languid, easy, yellow eyes glowing, edging closer, now seven feet away, now six feet. After ten minutes the tension was unbearable. José was drenched in sweat, his right arm shook from the weight of the machete. He switched hands, felt the weapon in his left, hoped the cat didn’t notice the new awkwardness for a minute or so while he recovered. He felt dreamy, as if the cat were hypnotizing him. Fear overwhelmed him. This man of the jungle was falling apart.
After fifteen minutes, the cat started moving faster. It edged in, coiled, watched the machete move, then turned back to pacing. It looked for openings, felt the timing of the weapon. José was all strung out. His nerves were frayed. The yellow eyes were taking him over. His body shook. José started sobbing. He backed away from the cat, and this was a mistake. The jaguar moved in. Straight in. It showed its teeth, crouched to leap. José had no fight left. He gave himself up and there was a crack through the night. Then shouting. The cat turned. Another crack rang out and then two young men ran through the bush screaming. José’s son took aim with his gun, but the cat vanished into the darkness, leaving a father weeping on the jungle floor. Three years later, José still hadn’t recovered from this encounter. The villagers say he went mad. His spirit was broken.
When I heard this story, suspended in the Amazonian night, I was struck by how much I related to both the predator and the prey. I used to create chaos on the chessboard until my opponents crumbled from the pressure. I loved the unknown, the questions, and they wanted answers. When there were no answers, I was home and they were terrified. The game was mine. Then my psychology got complicated and the tables were turned. In my early encounters with world-class Grandmasters, I was usually beaten like José. The chess position might be objectively even, but as the tension on the board mounted it felt as though a vise was slowly cinching down on my head, tighter, tighter, until I reached a bursting point and made some small concession like José backing up, a tiny imprecision that changed the character of the game, anything to release the pressure on my brain. Then they were all over me.
Grandmasters know how to make the subtlest cracks decisive. The only thing to do was become immune to the pain, embrace it, until I could work through hours of mind-numbing complexities as if I were taking a lovely walk in the park. The vise, after all, was only in my head. I spent years working on this issue, learning how to maintain the tension—becoming at peace with mounting pressure. Then, as a martial artist, I turned this training to my advantage, making my opponents explode from mental combustion because of my higher threshold for discomfort.
In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre. In competition, the dynamic is often painfully transparent. If one player is serenely present while the other is being ripped apart by internal issues, the outcome is already clear. The prey is no longer objective, makes compounding mistakes, and the predator moves in for the kill. While more subtle, this issue is perhaps even more critical in solitary pursuits such as writing, painting, scholarly thinking, or learning. In the absence of continual external reinforcement, we must be our own monitor, and quality of presence is often the best gauge. We cannot expect to touch excellence if “going through the motions” is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art, and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight. Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential—for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line.
The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.