Inside the Wheels
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 07:15AM I leave in an hour for Cleveland and Vancouver. I am going back into book tour mode. Last year, when that was about my only mode, I would try to climb each time I came home to Boulder. I would text potential partners the moment my plane touched down at DIA. Three, sometimes four leads in, I would get a yes. I would pick up the van in long term parking, drive home and make a list of what all I needed to do in the 12 hours before I went climbing: get dog, unpack, groceries, bills, eat, sleep, pack for climbing. Those first nights at home were never restful as I was caught between catching up with my body and soul after flying and demanding an entirely different level of performance the next day.
I’m doing it again. I’m loading pre- and post-speaking trips with climbing plans. It’s some sort of weird self-rationing behavior.
How much energy can you divide between desires? Do things only really flow if they get 100%? Somewhere inside me I think that I can shoot off 37 emails, write two proposals, have a conference call, and then head out for a quick vertical romp.
Maybe that worked last year—with rock climbing buttressing my other jobs. But now I’m in NH. In the winter. With ice. I moved here, in part, because that was the plan.
Ice is everywhere in the North Country. It is actually possible to get in a quick couple of pitches of frozen water here—too possible. You can see it out your door. But that vision also suggests that you should be able to just climb, well, at any moment. That you should be able to snap your tools into the ice with precision, know when to trust them, step up high, reach, and go again. That you can transition from reading international news briefs to reading ice. That the textual information with change to textural information.
I climbed 370 feet of ice yesterday. By the 320th foot, it felt normal. If I went climbing today, I could build on that. But I have to catch a plane. I’m giving three lectures and four interviews in the next five days. Based on my ice experience, by the last interview it will feel normal. And then I will get on another plane and come home. It’s a sick sort of personal challenge. But I’m working on a new plan, at least in my luggage.
Here’s the list: high heels, chalk bag, credit card machine, harness, puffy jacket, white coat, climbing shoes. They are all going with me this time, so I can keep trying to layer versions of myself upon each other until I can no longer tell which is which.
Reader Comments (3)
The only constant is change itself, right?
Just as I was coming into my own as a climber and understanding myself as an individual who worked a day job but lived a vertical life in the interstices (or, if you will, the liminal state between workdays), it all changed. I spent my 20s developing that self-definition, and then got married, moved, bought a home, had a child. These are wonderful things, but different choices that altered the way my days move and flow. Now nearly a decade later, I still understand myself as a climber, but I only get to climb occasionally (the IME ice fest two weeks ago is the one ice jaunt I take each year). I also understand myself as a father, partner, activist, student, worker, etc.
So just as I developed that sense of self, my life changed around it. Much like your sense of climbing most of the day to get into that sense of climbing, just before the day ends. I suspect vacations are like this for most people who take the traditional one-week to somewhere exotic: just as you're relaxing and beginning to engage in the new place, your week is over.I suspect the macro version of this happens repeatedly over the course of a life, but ask me again in 10 years, when I might be climbing a lot again, just as I've adjusted to this version of my life....
I like how you're taking little bits of each life with you when you travel to try to keep an engagement in each piece of you. I still struggle with the line between trying to be (or do) too many things at once and the more Buddhist perspective of doing what is in front of you completely and exclusively.
That last line bit is solid. Very witty.
I think the perspective that all of this shifting is part of the macro cycle of life is probably spot on. What is interesting it that this seems so surprising for so many of us. IE, the sense that there would be a level of permanence to life as you get older, when in fact it is just other levels of fluxing. I think that if you are a climber, and if you are driven by that or have been driven by it, that you will add more flux, because you are always aware of what the other option might be. Maybe there has to be that growing seed of desire for many to ultimately create the cycle of change.