"Why do you climb?"
It can be an easy question to ask myself a few hundred feet off the ground when my legs are starting to shake and the next hold is just a bit too far out of reach. I know my mom probably asks herself, not infrequently, why her son is a climber too. The difference between our questions is that mine is rhetorical. I know why I like dangling off of cliffs in the Rocky Mountains. I think my mom’s “why” is more of a conflict between a plea and honest incomprehension. The thing is, you don’t need to be a climber to understand why I or anyone else loves the sport. The benefits that I find in climbing are most definitely not limited to the scaling of rock formations. The same reward I get from bagging a new route can be found in an artist finishing a new piece, a guitarist writing a new song, or a grandmother knitting her latest masterpiece. We all uncover our passions in different places. Mine just happens to reside in places where my mom wishes I wouldn’t go.
A famous French alpinist named Lionel Terray once called climbers “the conquistadors of the useless.” This statement isn’t a false one. Climbing a mountain doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything tangible, but that’s not what I’m after. What it gives me is zen: focusing in on a single moment without worrying about the past or the future. It is a balance of body and mind. When I’m climbing, I don’t have time to worry about anything but the next move. There’s something romantic about living frame to frame, within each transient moment as it passes, when every instant is like a meticulous and purposeful stroke from the brush of a calligrapher.
A zen state of mind can be difficult to come by in the torrential flow of modern life. Our smart phones give us an enormous amount of convenience day to day, but they are also a gateway through which our bosses, professors, and social media accounts can hack into our lives at any given moment. We are constantly torn from the present with Instagram notifications, text messages, and emails, to the point that we’re always living in several places at once. That’s why I like climbing; it seems to meld my divergent realities back together into something that makes some more sense. Plus, it can be hard to find cell service in the mountains.
Climbing for me is both an escape from and a complete immersion into life. It serves as an exit door through which my stresses and worries can’t follow, but at the same time, I always feel most alive watching the ground fall further and further beneath my feet. Climbing is all about the view. When I tie in, the change in perspective that takes place from the ground to the top of the final pitch is synonymous with the perspective shift on everything else going on in my life. The responsibility for me and my partner’s lives as well as the occasional fear of death and a frequent sense of euphoric exhilaration all do a fine job of straightening out my priorities. Heading home after a great climb is when I feel most balanced. All the pieces of my life seem to fit back into place or at least end up closer than they were before. You don’t have to be the Dalai Lama to find a slice of nirvana in life; you just need to find something you love doing.
