Thoughts on taking a break from climbing… or not
I see deep play everywhere, expressed in infinite ways. It captures, for me, a quality of attention that is unexpected in adult life, and which we barely recognize in children. That’s because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavors. But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters so completely to you…. Play is a form of enchantment….
from Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May, 2023.
Play is something humans have always done. It brings us happiness–joy, even– in a necessary way. Katherine May goes on to say, “Conventional wisdom says that most of us lose the thread of it, our minds greying alongside our hair…” Climbing has long been my way to play. However, for most of my adult life, I have wondered if fun and play is somewhat frivolous and felt pangs of guilt for how much time I spend climbing, thinking about climbing. I have been writing about climbing for years to push back against this negativity, this guilt, to be able to articulate, even if just for myself, why it’s worthwhile to devote time to.
“What matters is that we play at all, that we nurture that particular quality of attention…”
I’m intrigued by this word enchantment. The dictionary definition is “(n) a feeling of great pleasure; delight; (v) the state of being under a spell.” To me, this word has become Disney-ified, so immediately I think of fairy tales and magic. Maybe a bit of Harry Potter. Sparkles and glitter. This is not all terrible, but May goes way below a surface understanding of enchantment in her book (duh, it’s the title). She says that enchantment “comes from deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing.”
The point of her writing this book is because she found that enchantment was something she lost in becoming an adult. She thought she had to let go of it to grow up. What replaced enchantment or wonder was anxiety, and so she’s trying to find it again: “the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.” We are surrounded by magic, even in the very earthy, ordinary things in our lives, if we would just take notice.
This quality of close attention and total absorption happens when I go rock climbing. I think it’s possible to say that even indoors there is a similar deep engagement– problem solving with our minds and bodies that defines serious play. We play to engage our bodies and minds in different ways than we do in our workday. Play is rest.
It’s already February and the dead of winter. A friend of mine has begun working on his next outdoor climbing project on the heels of sending his last one. It’s winter, and he’s been out on it frequently. And no, the route isn’t in the desert or anywhere that when the sunshine comes out it gets beautiful and warm. This project is at the New River Gorge in West Virginia. In January, he was on the route in temps below freezing and while the heavens were dumping snow.
I don’t have to tell you that I know because he’s posting it on social media. That’s a given, more often than not, which is fine. I’m not writing to complain that my friend is projecting something in the winter, and I’m not complaining because he’s posting it on his socials. Obviously, if I know he’s posting about it, it’s because I’m on the socials too.
I am writing to complain about what seeing the pictures and reels on Instagram is doing to me.
My problem is the common, every day injection of FOMO that Meta is making me feel acutely this winter. The photos and reels of my friend working on this beautiful, sometimes creamy-white, sometimes gray, sandstone climb in the daydreamy muted silence with snow falling all around the unpopulated crag made me instantly envious. My breath caught, and I had to ignore the sudden, strong urge to pack up the van and join him. I want to feel that enchantment.
If the urge was sudden, it was also very fleeting. Very, very fleeting. I quickly reminded myself, Self, you do not want to be out climbing in that right now, and you know it. Social media has a way of making things look way dreamier than they are in real life,– more enchanted, even– and I reminded myself of how miserable I would be in that situation, how incapacitated by the cold. I’d be unable to play and would become disenchanted, in those conditions. I reminded myself that winter is for hibernating, for resting. I have almost always taken a winter rest.
So rest, I said to myself, and revel in the quiet of the resting. Resting from climbing in the wintertime can be kind of like being in the outdoors on a snowy evening alone, but warmer. Rest has its own way of being muted, silent, dreamy. Hmmm. Rest as enchantment? Rest from rest?
At the end of 2023 when we returned home from Hueco Tanks (see how I can write about Hueco even when I’m not writing about Hueco!), I was going to give my tired old, body some time off. I was looking forward to it. Then I read something (a post on IG probably) from ClimbStrong though, that over the holidays was not the time to take time off from climbing, that climbing was a good way to balance out damage done by eating a bunch of junk food at all the holiday parties and family get togethers there would be from Thanksgiving through the New Year. Now’s the time to build that strong foundation for this year’s goals! I totally bought into it and decided to keep climbing but only to do it “for fun” in the gym.
But hey, what does this “for fun” phrase mean? If climbing is play, don’t I normally climb for fun? Why else would I climb if not “for fun,” you may be wondering. What I mean by “for fun” is, no specific training: no “triples” on routes, no “1-2-3 capacity” on boulder problems, no “pyramid boulders,” no weighted pulls, no campus board, no workouts or drills. Just climbing whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it. Training for climbing is usually my preference because I know I’m getting sh*t something done. It’s fun for me in its own way but is more about pushing myself, trying to get stronger. Climbing for fun is less focused and more spontaneous. Climbing for fun may be more like play; training for climbing, though serious, is still play. This is how I’ve always approached climbing. Seriously. I’m sure some other climbers are like this too. I hope. I don’t think I’m alone. A lot of us climbers are just regular people, not any kind of famous professionals, but our lives still revolve around it as if it’s our bread and butter. As if our life and the good of the universe depends on it. As if without it, the world would end. Part of the game is wanting to improve and climb harder, maybe more beautiful routes. We play to eventually win. Sometimes, the joy we experience makes it hard for some of us to stop, to take a break and find a different way to play.
Anyway, I told myself, Self, you can take some time off in January.
Now January is almost over and the only thing I really rested from was taking videos of myself climbing in the gym to post on socials. That’s a good thing to rest from, and it probably helped my soul, but I have kept on climbing. I can’t help it. Though I’m not posting, I’m still lurking and seeing everyone else’s posts about their outdoor and even indoor climbing exploits, which is keeping the hungry, green-eyed monster, Jealousy, alive.
But that isn’t the only reason I’m still going to the climbing gym a few times a week. Even climbing inside pushes back against all the dark hours of winter, pushes back against how much time I sit still in front of my computer thinking. I used to run in the winter as way to play outside, but I don’t do that anymore. Brian likes to mountain bike in the winter, but that’s a momentum sport, and I’ve decided not to take that up at my age. I imagine myself breaking all sorts of bones and then really being stuck. So climbing is all I have. I’m also a tad afraid at this point in my life to not climb at all for more than one week.
I thought taking a month off would be good, but I don’t want to be without it or using my climbing muscles for that long. I don’t want to dig myself into a hole in strength– especially finger strength– that I won’t be able to climb (ahem!) back out of once the rest is over. I don’t want to break my habit. I don’t want to form a different, bad habit of inactivity that I have to struggle to break later. I also have to consider that, as a 50 year old woman, it’s becoming easier for me to lose muscle and very, very difficult to build it back. You might think, Oh, come on, lose muscle in one month? And my only response is, I don’t know, I haven’t been 50 before. That’s what I’ve been told. Maybe I wouldn’t, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.
So what do I do? I’m still on the tired side. I’m in danger of the weather getting warm enough to go climbing outside but being too tired to motivate myself to drive out of the city. If I don’t take a break now, I also won’t have time to get back into the swing of things in order to climb on routes at the NRG, which is what I want to spend more time doing this spring and summer, partly because watching my friend work on a route down there has made me want to work on routes down there too.
What I really ought to do is hibernate from social media, delete IG from my phone and stop checking FB. I could do that for a month– or forever. I arrived late to the social media party a few years ago, so for a long time my climbing was not affected as much by what other people were doing, and taking time off was just fine– it was silent and restful. Out of sight, out of mind. I miss those days! Being on social media makes conflict a daily struggle– not conflict with others, but conflict within myself, like this argument I had inside about not driving to the NRG to climb in a snow storm. It’s false enchantment in that it isn’t mine. I’d like to avoid that internal turmoil, that frequent hot jolt of FOMO, to break the habit of only being motivated to do something because everyone else is doing it, to give myself the chance to nurture motivation and desire that originates inside of my own heart. Because, if it doesn’t originate there, I may have a problem.
I’ll probably still take a break from climbing if even for a little bit here, a little bit there. That could mean increasing another activity, like strength training and core and staying completely off the walls. Or I could keep climbing easy stuff on a rope, completely taking a break from bouldering and falling, and supplement it with restorative yoga. Another friend of mine has suggested I try jiu jitsu.
Eek!
Or I could stop thinking about it so much, and continue to do what I’m doing because whatever I decide won’t change the trajectory of human history, the world won’t come to an end (yet), and the universe doesn’t really care. It may not matter that much even to my own future, in the long run. It could be enough that I’m noticing the need to slow down.
