Fuego Valiente

Imagine yourself on a mountain, with both your feet sustained by a narrow protrusion from a rock face as smooth as glass. You have the index and middle fingers of your right hand stuffed into a pocket about hip height, scrambling for a place to grab with your left. You feel your climbing rope hanging down limp from your waist, you look up, it’s just a few meters until the reunion, the summit. You look down, well it’s a long ways down, a dizzying ways down. You can feel your hands start to sweat, wait, that’s to isolated to to be sweat, your finger has started bleeding a little. A certain sort of cold terror carried by a harsh wind on the exposed face starts to grip you. Options are, fall, or attempt a wild upwards manoeuvre, and likely fall regardless.

I recently started rock climbing, and while I don’t claim much proficiency at it, I know my gear, I know my knots, and I know my climbing partners. The first lesson after ropes and knots was that being strong doesn’t make you a better climber (though, I know, it’s hard to find a proficient climber without rippling muscles). The second lesson was that even good balance won’t directly make you a better climber, it’s faith, or the lack thereof that separates the men from the boys.

Strength and balance are poor friends when you’re tired after after a long, challenging ascent. Your legs might start shaking, your finger might start bleeding, the wind might cause shivers, or worse, it could start to rain. It’s faith in your gear and your partner that make it possible to leave behind safety over and over again on your way up an arduous and unknown route.

Which is where we come to the crux of the issue, the gear I climb with could hold my small car over a cliffs edge without it falling off, but that factual information is generally of little comfort to me if I don’t really believe it. An experienced and proficient climber has deep experiential knowledge of his equipments performance under normal conditions such as falling. He trusts it completely, he’s fallen often. So while an unexpected slip of the foot leading to a great slide will likely get his heart racing, before the rope catches him, he’s probably already mentally moved on to how to try again.

So there you have it, life lesson: falling or failing is a necessary component to achieving success and to date I’ve found no successful people who would state other wise.