Essay: The Seduction of Climbing
To live a complete life or an accomplished life, one has little instructions. There are varying schools of thought. Some prescribe hedonism as the way to sqeeze the sweetest nectars of experience, or teach stoicism as the way to discipline and grow one's spirit. And many paths inbetween. But at the mid-point or end of a life, how do you measure its worth?
For one raised in a culture of workaholism, you count the acts of accomplishment. But which acts do you count? Does the daily brushing of one's teeth count as significant? Or does the promotion resulting in 15% of one's paycheck mark a critical point? Days pass into years with little sense of significance. Time begins to feel lik the slow dripping of a leaky faucet.
So for the lost boys and girls for whom the standards of work and society hold little bearing, there is the work of the climb.
Climbing accomplishment might be measured in the sheer difficulty of the routes one has climbed. Feats with ratings above 5.13 will win a climber a temporary space in a magazine article. Then again one might count the volume of routes one has climbed. First ascentionists are the artist-explorers or visionaries, who imagine a line out of raw, untouched rock.
What separates climbing feats from more mundane life experiences is the clear cut sense of progression found in climbing. In the lessons and errors it takes to progress from a 5.4 rating leader to 5.7 rating leader (or higher), there is a personal satisfaction in the linear sense of growth. In life, there are unpredictable events like layoff, divorce, illness, which may cross like a streak of bad lightning but nevertheless can lead to a personal sense of incompetence.
In climbing, you either pass, fail, or nearly always have the final option to try again to complete a route. With the results so immediately gratifying, you can quickly acknowledge where you stand in relation to your hopes and goals.
Here lies the seduction of climbing. The definition of success is sharp and succinct. And like a lab rat which has learned the path in a maze to cheese, I return again and again.
Does a devotion to climbing then hold any meaning in and of itself? Or hold higher value in comparison to more standard life pursuits (like 2.5 kids, dog, home/mortgage, SUV)? That remains to be seen.
It is clearly possible that one can find spiritual meaning in the lonely wilds of rocky gardens as well as in the domesticated walls of one's community.
Today, there are no knights on horses. No clear heroes or villains. Good guys and bad guys have bled into indistinguishable shades of grey.
But in a climbing experience, all the better if it becomes an epic, one can be a hero, albeit a slightly contrived one. For all the cares of the modern world, and the real risks of playing in nature, it is a priceless thing to feel the hero's warmth in your blood. Even but for a brief moment.
See Also:
poem: soloist
essay: the best climbing meal
tr: fear of commitment
