What Deb wanted me to do, what she was yelling up at me to do, was to look at my foot. She wanted me to look at my foot, look at the rock wall, look for a place on the rock wall where I could plant my foot, and then, only then, did she want me to put my weight on the foot and continue my ascent. She wanted me to stop using my faith-based technique, which involved blindly lifting my leg and then groping for a toe hold.
I could use someone like her in other areas of my life. Someone to tell me to walk before I run and to look before I leap. I looked down. I planted my foot. I climbed a few more feet. Deb was obviously brilliant.
Every now and then, someone tells me that I am “fearless.” What they mean is that I’ve done something risky like dodged a secure job or moved to a foreign country on a whim (again), and that while it has not yet gone wrong, it could. But there’s fear and then there’s fear. I’m afraid of spiders and needles and falling down.
Kristin, in contrast, has been cautious in her life’s moves. She’s a banker, she has investments, and she lives in the city where we were born. Of physical fear, though, she knows nothing, I thought, as I watched her negotiate the Wharepapa Crag. We were taking turns climbing the bolted routes up this 65-foot hunk of ignimbrite in the middle of the North Island, which, like so much of New Zealand, once came out of a volcano. I had scaled walls at indoor climbing gyms, but my first real rock was different. It was higher. It was harder to hang on to. It was unpredictable.
On the rock wall, she took risks more easily than I did. When I got into a securely balanced position, I became unwilling to move. (When I get into a securely balanced position in life, I get the urge to escape.) She pushed off the rock and kept going. She risked falls more often than I did. Even though I knew that my harness was secure, and that Deb had her eye on me and her hand on the belaying rope, I shied away from adventurous grabs and reaches. I didn’t like that downward lurch.
Strange, then, that I should court the downward lurch in other areas of my life. Like the narrator in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, “I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I should only have change—change and the excitement of the unforeseen.” When Kristin and I were 23, we took off together on a backpacking trip around Australia. Kristin went home after three months; it took me 13. In fact, for me, the trip didn’t even really begin until I accidentally-on-purpose lost my return ticket, around Month 3, and found myself alone in a small town with no idea what would happen next. That was excitement. Kristin couldn’t handle the free fall, I thought then. She needed her safety net of familiar surroundings.
On the Wharepapa Crag, it was I who was leery about falls. I hesitated to look at my feet, because it meant looking down, and I worried that looking down might disturb my delicate balance. But I tried, and it didn’t. I was discovering that climbing didn’t scare me as much as I had feared it might. Maybe this was because it left no place in my mind to worry, or maybe it was simply that tenacious gripping was much more my bag than letting go. It gives at least the illusion of control.
Nothing distracted me, not even the thrilling novelty of blue sky in my peripheral vision. The beauty of rock climbing, I decided, was that it required so much concentration that I couldn’t think about anything else. That man, my bank balance, fear of failure: all were swept away when I was reaching for the next ledge.
Of course, in rock climbing you sometimes have to let go, too. Clinging tenaciously to a secure spot makes it hard to move up. Having planted that foot, you have to put your weight on it, push off, and trust that your hand will reach the next hold. This was tricky. I had much to learn about getting unstuck. For instance, when I came to a spread-eagled standstill, Deb called, “Ya can stand on one foot on the ground, can’t ya?” Somehow this had failed to occur to me.
In the car, before rock climbing, in another extended mutual counseling session, Kristin had advised, “Sometimes, just getting in a track and staying in a track is the best idea.” We were talking about my career. While my friends calculated their equity, I still found it hard to choose the practical thing. It was sound advice: Make some choices, get on a track, and take small, steady steps. Sometimes, though, I wanted to tell her to let go a little. Move to Sydney or Dubai, dump the doctor, start a business. See what happens. If you can’t let go of the last place you were, you can’t arrive somewhere new.
The overhang above me looked impossible. What I thought I knew about physics and gravity told me that there was no way up. Deb and Kristin were calling to me, telling me where to put my hands and my feet. “I can’t reach!” I said.
But I could, and I did. It took careful, deliberate positioning, followed by a deep breath and a risk. The first time I reached the top of the crag, I was sure it was a fluke.
When I watched the wave sailors in Taranaki, I thought they were all a little crazy. Without that craziness, I knew they couldn’t soar, but it worried me that Kristin was willing to swim with the sharks. I was of the opinion that she should cut down on her risk-taking on the treacherous shoals—the literal ones—and bring a little of it into her stable life.
When I began this trip, I said that I was secretly hoping for an epiphany. Actually, that yearning is my more-or-less constant condition. I couldn’t say that it had been fulfilled (it rarely is), but at least, maybe, I was gaining a useful lesson or two. I’m still convinced that if you give a strange place your patience, it will give you good surprises. But those jagged rocks were getting jaggeder. A little more looking at my feet wouldn’t hurt.
