Something Dramatically New

Following up on the last blog, I've been thinking of my life without an escape plan and no ability to downclimb, metaphorically or otherwise...

What I love most about climbing is the here and now experience of it. I don't climb often, but when I do, the reality of the here and now in the moment on real rock is a beautiful thing. There's never a moment for me of "can I do it?" It's just doing it. Nothing else matters.

I was talking with friends today about the illusion of hope and its dangers. At first they thought me morbid, because I decided to "unfriend" hope. Perhaps they still think me morbid. I didn't mean it in that sense, but in the sense that when I have hope for something, it resides in the future, which isn't here yet. The shadow side of hope for some is despair, and for me is that that which I'd hoped for and perhaps even had, will disappear. It strikes me that those feelings relate to fear, and all fear is based in the past.

I need to repeat this, for myself as well as my blog readers:

ALL FEAR IS IN THE PAST

Everything we fear isn't based upon the newness of an experience we might face, but an experience in our past when something failed, or we had a bad time of it. The idea of even trying something new or different is terrifying for some (including me), because we've got something anchoring us to a time in the past when it didn't work out as we'd have liked it to.

So, here's my issue with hope and its shadow: Hope is all about the future, its shadow is all about the past and when I get hooked into feeling hope, I find myself in a dance with the past and future. I suspect that on some level, we all do. So where is the here and now moment? It's not the hope, it's not the shadow, and it's not the dance itself. There is no time or space for the here and now moment.

Why do we so fear the here and now? What could we do with the reality of it? When I'm on real rock, I know it intimately. There's really no choice in the matter, if I'm going to climb. All instincts are honed toward what is immediately before me. Choices are made though experimentation, experience and and what works.

When I'm living in the here and now moments away from rock climbing, magic can happen. Miracles are seen with new eyes, because my mind's not racing toward some illusion destination, or caught up in some strange, bad place in my past.

Ironically, in my post 8 days ago, I talked about how I don't cry, and found myself uncontrollably weeping these past few days. That's the part that makes the here and now difficult, because you've got to deal with the raw emotion as it comes. I can't schedule it or put it off, because doing such things will kill you in the end. My weeping had nothing to do with regret, and everything to do with being truly sad.

I stayed in my here and now moment then with the tears, and presently I am feeling some wonderous sense of peace. I'd told my friends if I "unfriended hope" that perhaps peace would find me and it did. It's not that I have any resolution whatsoever with what's going on in my life or around me. That's a chaotic swirl still. It's more that I found the peace within my soul beyond the darkness I had to walk through to get to it. Some might call that God's grace, others serenity.

I don't want to label the gift the Creator gave me, define it or put it in a box. I don't want to hold onto it with both hands, fearful that it will go away. I only want to acknowledge the beauty of it, and in my prayers, send it along to all others who are suffering and struggling through their darkness. Because to hold onto any one thing too tightly with both hands demonstrates a lack of faith that it will return again when needed. It also doesn't afford me the opportunity to reach out to others, or to real rock, as the case may be.

And that is something dramatically new.

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...