And Morbid Thoughts Shall Accompany Me

Hello Dearest Blog Followers,

I'm getting ready for my crack climbing in a few weeks, and as you might recall from an earlier post, this rock climbing trip is a metaphor for facing fears.

Well, just when I get to the place of the trip coming up, I suddenly discover a new one! How very exciting!

In my blog on Climbing as a Metaphor, I talk about how I metaphorically downclimbed to safety in a crisis situation, and that I'm standing at the base of the rock, wondering how I'll ever get to climbing again.

This trip, I've selected crack climbing, which uses hand and toe jams into crevices, a very different experience. My adventurous self is up for the challenge, until it occurs to me that I have no idea of how to self-rescue or down climb from a crack climb. This is accompanied by visions of the belayer beneath me dying of a heart attack, or me happily climbing along, until the rope above me snaps and I watch it sailing down past me as I hang there.

Sometimes having an active imagination decidedly does NOT serve me well.

So I'll put it back to the metaphor from which this whole adventure originates. Yes, I'm used to climbing, but I'm used to and know more traditional routes. I suspect that my morbid fears are the result of my taking the unfamiliar course. And really, it's not what I know about climbing, it's what I know about myself that matters.

My friends would laugh and tell me that they've never known me to take a familiar route and speculate that perhaps I'm allergic to them. They may well be right. I've got this believe that if some challenge is thrown my way, some insurmountable odds, then there's also a gift that comes in the form of overcoming it, if I'm open enough to it to see it.

Essentially, the question then becomes - Am I?

Where does the courage and will to move forward despite all of the odds come from, if not from my openness to the experience of something dramatically new?

One of my cousins sent me today a letter that was erroneously ascribed to a famous Latin American writer, but was, in fact, written by an obscure ventriloquist about his puppet. Despite the lack of fame, the ventriloquist wrote something quite beautiful. The part that sticks out in my mind was:

"I have learned that everybody wants to live at the top of the mountain without realizing that true happiness lies in the way we climb the slope." (Johnny Welch)

It makes me wonder if the way in which I've climbed the slope all of these years has been to always have an escape from disaster plan in the back of my head, and that the reason I've been more open to new experiences has been because I'm good at anticipating how to escape said experience should "new" suddenly be replaced with "dangerous."

Perhaps I am not The Gambler after all, but Houdini.

Now, there's a lot to be said for figuring out how to safely extract oneself from danger. But if that's become the course I take, then safety has replaced true happiness in my climb up the slope. So I've found another goal for myself this trip, it seems...