Ah, the new year: a time of hope, promise, and marketing campaigns. No, thank you, I don’t want to join your gym or shed six inches from my midsection. This time of year always comes with an arbitrary incentive, where motivation feels obligatory. Like, “Now’s the time to do the thing!” “Look, everybody else is doing it!!” The thing about that kind of motivation, though – the kind that comes from the outside – is that it’s almost always a flash in the pan. Three months from now, a lot of people will think less “hope” and more “broken promises” about this time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
I realize this sounds very cynical. I’m actually an eternal optimist. Honest. What I’m trying to get at is something a bit deeper: I think the new year is a great prompt to reconsider, to shift priorities, and to better understand why you do what you do – and why you did what you did. And that’s a different thing entirely from the general “New Year, new you” propaganda. This could be a time to set lofty goals if that’s what makes sense for you. But it could also be a time to take a step back. Mostly, I think it’s a good time to just think about stuff. Because in my opinion, we don’t spend nearly enough time doing that.
What I’m thinking about
I don’t know about you, but I almost always have some sort of gnawing internal compass pushing me in a certain direction. Sometimes, I understand it. Sometimes, I don’t. But I try to listen to it: it’s almost always right. And it’s pushing me further into climbing this year. There will be more to come on exactly what that means and what it looks like. But it’s got me thinking more about why I climb – about what the meaning of it all is, and about why it’s got so many of us hooked.
I grew up doing ballet. I started when I was five, and stopped just shy of taking a real stab at being a professional. I loved it, in the same way that I – and probably you – love climbing. It took over my life. I sat in biology class visualizing sequences. I consumed all the (minimal) dance content that existed. It was a big part of my identity. But when you grow up, you kind of have to shit or get off the pot: if you’re going to do 30 hours a week of dance, it probably needs to be your job. I took a year after high school to focus on dance, and I learned that trying to earn a living from it wasn’t for me. It took all the joy out.
I stopped dancing. I went to university. I partied – a lot. I tried to figure out what to do with my life. I got a job. I was really good at the job. I liked the job. But I couldn’t imagine working it for the rest of my life. So I quit and moved to Sweden, where I had no job, no friends, and I didn’t speak the language. It was – by far – the hardest and scariest thing I’d ever done. Moving to the other side of the world to find yourself is very fucking trite, and it wasn’t exactly my intention. But that’s kind of what happened. And then I found climbing.
Why climbing is important to me
This is a roundabout way of highlighting the importance of some kind of complicated movement in my life. Through my ballet era, climbing era, and the fuzzy years in between, I learned that I need this thing to be happy. Whether it’s climbing or dancing, I need to move – in some kind of convoluted, sequential way (running doesn’t cut it).
I don’t know if I came out of the womb this way or if it’s just how I learned to operate, literally growing up dancing. Teenage me used dance to deal with my emotions – all of them. Happy? Dance. Sad? Dance. Angry? Fucking dance. And adult me has absolutely replaced that with climbing. I have a suspicion that a lot of climbers do the same thing.
Climbing has become a conduit through which I experience the world. I form my relationships around it. I travel to climb. I derive meaning from my ascents – or lack thereof – and it often drives my decisions. More deeply, climbing teaches me things about the world and about myself. Just like dance did.
Happiness pixels
My old coach, Karly, told me about happiness pixels over a beer in Vegas a couple of years ago. She said that everybody has these things, around three to five of them, that they need on a regular basis to be happy – like multiple times a week. Talking to people about their happiness pixels is wild. You should try it. “Good coffee” was on Karly’s list, and “showers” were on mine. We looked at each other incredulously, barely able to believe that the other person cared that much about something we didn’t care about at all. But climbing – in one form or another – was on both our lists.
I think this kind of thinking is really helpful in setting priorities – maybe even goals – and making decisions that make you happy. Not the “climb x grade” kind: the stuff underneath. Knowing why you climb, and emphasizing that thing. Because performance and longevity come from the fire that’s underneath. That’s what makes you squeeze in that session at the end of a busy work day, or try so hard that you nearly pass out, or get through another finger injury. I mean, maybe that thing is climbing x grade for you, but I’m willing to bet it’s something else. Because grades are both arbitrary and fleeting.
We’ve all heard a million times by now that “climbing is 99.9% failing”. So what is it that keeps you coming back? And how can you use that thing to be a better, happier, and – yes – higher performing climber? I think that’s what the new year is really about. Being a better version of yourself – but your real self. Not a slimmed-down, fingers-of-steel, V14 crusher. Or maybe that too. But that’s more of the outcome than the objective in itself. I highly doubt that Will Bosi has been toiling away just fucking waiting until the day he sent V17. He’s motivated in some other kind of way. So am I. And you probably are too.
Happy New Year.
Featured image credit: Ryman Wiemann