For my whole life I have been afraid of heights. Or I guess more technically I have been afraid of falling from heights, as the old joke goes.
This fear is the main reason I put off getting into rock climbing for as long as I did. What kind of idiot intentionally does things that scare them, I ask you. Before this year, climbing was something I would do once in a great while, usually as some kind of social outing, never frequently enough to get any better or worse at it. When I was a kid, my Boy Scout troop would go once a year for a “lock-in” overnight at a climbing gym, but I spent most of that time eating pizza and trying to look busy and/or accomplished so that my less-risk-averse peers would think I had done more climbing than I had.1
But this past spring, after years of cajoling from my wife and a few of our friends, I joined the same bouldering gym that the rest of them belong to. I had let them drag me out to a climbing adventure on the sea cliffs of Maine in 2019, and I reasoned that this was at least less intimidating than that had been.
Most walls in a bouldering gym are not all that high, relatively speaking. But that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me once I’ve gotten up a few holds and am definitively Off The Ground. Bouldering for me is occasionally an exercise in beating back the paralyzing visions that could otherwise overwhelm me the minute I get myself up into the air. Sometimes I do this by talking to my wife or my friends on the ground, whose suggestions for where to reach or step are usually good ones and whose real voices break through the ones in my head. But when I climb alone, I still have to break the silence. So a lot of times when I’m up there I’ll just be muttering a string of epithets and frustrations. Ohjesusyou’vegottabeKIDDINGme. ComeoncomeoncomeON. Youstupidgoddamnthing.
This, at least, is familiar territory: the steady self-cursing monologue that accompanies anything I do that is physically taxing or stressful. Hiking or moving furniture or driving in bad weather. That kind of thing.
But like just about everything else, these fears and these frustrations have been lessened with time. It turns out that basically no one is just magically good at anything. Getting better at things takes dedication and practice and repetition, and probably enough intention so that those practice sessions start adding up to something. If nothing else I have gotten less cowardly up on the wall—a small step, but an important one, as it turns out that climbing is a really good workout that can occasionally make me feel good about myself. There are few feelings comparable to getting near the end of a bouldering “problem,” realizing that you have almost nothing left in the tank, willing your whole body’s safety to the strength of one hand already turned claw-like with strain and fatigue, and having that hand grab firmly onto the hold you’ve reached for. It’s worth all the other stuff.
And don’t get me wrong: there is plenty of other stuff. To be an adult novice at a climbing gym means surrounding yourself with beautiful, disgustingly fit strangers who propel themselves up the walls with such agility and grace that you wonder if you belong to the same species. In their measured and methodical approach they still get up the wall twice as fast as the people who try to brute force their way to the top. There’s this Latin oxymoron, a motto of Augustus, that says festina lente—“hurry up slowly”. Our teacher used to cite for us in high school, but it never made sense to me until I started watching talented climbers do their thing.
The other thing that makes climbing difficult for me is part of a larger issue that I’ve been working on my whole life—namely, that I am far too worried about what strangers think of me at any given moment. (Is that partly why I share my writing? To press the lever that sends serotonin to my little rat brain? Well, who’s to say.) As you can imagine, that kind of distracted concern is not particularly conducive to trying new things that you’re guaranteed to fail at. I have exactly one strategy for dealing with this particular anxiety, which is to repeat a mantra to myself from a good book:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration…
Okay wait not that one. This one:
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
It’s become trendy to mock Infinite Jest as a book for unremarkable men who think the world owes them something, and at the risk of outing myself as a member of that group, well—I think it’s got a lot of wisdom in its thousand-plus pages. That little phrase above is one good piece, and one I lean on often to get me past those weird moments when I am needlessly consumed by worry based on what I project onto others.
Instead, I am working on thinking about my climbing practice as an extension of my creative practice, which is territory that feels much more familiar to me. And by doing so I can lean into another favorite passage of mine, which comes from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It:
My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy.
Art does not come easy. But it’s all the more worth working at because of that.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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PPS - The cat’s out of the bag now. I’ll be appearing on Jeopardy! next week, on Tuesday November 2nd. Check your local listings.
The last one of these outings I went on, in 2007, ended up doubling as a first date with my now-wife. We were 17-year-old best friends and I had almost earned my Eagle Scout award—which ladies notoriously love—so I invited her along. We’ve been together ever since. That she agreed at all to go get locked in overnight in some random gym in Rochester with me was, in hindsight, a harbinger of many good things to come.
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