Does it not feel like humanity is trying to thread its way up the world’s highest steep cliff — with massive dropoffs, bleeding fingers, and no obvious handholds? Welcome to 2015.

And yet, it seems as if these two men currently inching up the Dawn Wall at Yosemite were more prepared at the outset than we will ever be, spending six years thinking about it and mapping the route, and a full year on various difficult portions of the wall, before attempting to ascend the entire smooth face.

The wall is hard, unyielding. Human ingenuity, grit, and determination must find a way up, despite unrelenting pain, and sometimes with many falls (the falls, but not the climbing, are supported by ropes), and detours and descents in order to complete even a tiny fraction of the next seemingly impossible pitch . . .

The men have a support team, and their ascent is being documented. We also, millions of us, are documenting — thanks to the internet — this pioneering human exploration up the massive wall of separation that has held each of us suspended over a chasm of nothingness for what is it now, thousands of years? — to the vast plain of connectedness. Are there others supporting us, watching over and rooting for us? Others in other dimensions, the ones we label, in fear, “alien”? I like to think so.

(I, for one, have always felt guided and protected by invisible energies, especially during those remarkable times in my life when, by any rational account, I should have died. Miracles do abound.)

The parallels are unmistakable. The fractal nature of this two-man climb, attempted as 2014 ends and 2015 begins, undeniable.