The Lucky Ones

My mother always made a big deal of birthdays. A festive tablecloth came out on the birthdays of family members, vinyl white with rainbow streamers, balloons, and “Happy Birthdays” painted on. A glass cake tray sat on the table and presents overflowed even when we didn’t have a lot of money. Joy abounded on birthdays. I remember most my mother’s smile while she watched us open gifts. I now have minimalist leanings and often prefer not to receive gifts. But, my love of birthdays and the bliss that accompanies them still grows on that foundation of gifts and excitement originally given to me by my mother.

I find it a challenge to communicate the variety of gratitude my birthday brings without feeling like I’m sounding cliched. But, the thanksgiving is visceral. My body exudes recognition of ALIVENESS while also acknowledging each year, each moment is one closer to the end. It’s overwhelming and invigorating in a way that begs me savor every moment. A quote by the Biologist Richard Dawkins may help to explain:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds…”

This year I took a day hike with my husband and sister to a section of the Appalachian Trail. We ate a picnic lunch at the summit, bouldered outside for the first time on some menacing rock stacks, and visited a nearby lake (you can see it in the above photo from the summit). They plucked four leaf clovers in the grass bordering the beach and we surveyed the new landscape the light created as the sun dipped behind the trees.

The entire day felt perfect. I felt overjoyed in a way I have not yet felt since moving back to my home state and experiencing the loss of my mother-in-law. The complex battles I have been fighting with anxiety, grief, and depression in the wake of the losses of her friendship/motherhood and the safe home my husband and I created in Oregon have been some of the most challenging of my life. But, as we drove back home with the western sky ablaze behind us, I listened to the words of Rebecca Solnit drift through the car as she spoke of hope in the dark. And, for a moment, I felt such a desire to hold on, to preserve the satisfaction and wildness I gathered from the hike.

Instead… and with great joy… I let it go.

An Ode to Climbing (and joy)

Recently, I have taken up the sport of bouldering. I’ve been thinking all week about what I’d like to write about for this Monday’s blog post and bouldering is just about the only thing I can think about these days. It is one of the greatest comforts and constants I have in my life now, in a time when many things are changing and a cross-country move this summer is looming in the background of everything.

In many ways, it feels like all roads have lead to bouldering. Sports and I have had a complicated relationship in the past. So, it took a while to get here.

I began playing (team) sports at a young age. First, I played soccer. Running up and down the field, breathless, always exhausted, praying for the coach to pull me. “Please, put me in time out. I just want to rest and hang out with my grandpa,” who came to almost every game. Next, was softball. I played softball for probably six years and was decent at the game until I hit puberty and became clumsy and self-conscious. I originally played shortstop and was a perfectly adequate batter. As I aged into a teenager, I was plopped into the outfield, right field, where balls would seldom fly. I was also the player for whom all the kids would groan when it was my time to bat. They knew, at bat, I often crumbled under the pressure of letting my team down. I played exactly one season of basketball. On this team, I arrived as a complete beginner to a team that had been playing for years. My teammates never passed the ball in a game, not once. For the whole season basketball seemed like just more endless running. Back and forth. Back and forth. Forever.

Sports in middle and high school looked akin to an endless void. I traded in those activities for drama and band and chorus. I had a strong disdain for any sport, really. In a lot of ways, I thought I would never play sports again of any kind. It wasn’t until college, ironically, when I was forced into taking physical education, that I practiced sports voluntarily. In college, I took classes in swimming in running and soon found myself running in 5k and 10k races, eventually completing a half-marathon and also dabbling in sprint triathlons.

I ran for several years after college before finding yoga and realizing that I actually hated running. Turns out I could get that elusive “runner’s high” from other more palatable activities. Now, yoga is hardly a sport. But, it did get me into my body in similar ways as sports intend to do and yoga was also the key that opened the door for me to try team sports again. Non-competitive sports like yoga and hiking helped me to feel strong, confident, and centered. So, when I was invited to play pickup games of sand volleyball with friends, I acquiesced and actually enjoyed myself.

I never considered I would get into climbing because of an intense fear of heights that I have carried since I was a small child. And yet, I fell instantly in love with it. I fell in love with the way it feels to have your whole body up against a wall, experiencing every muscle contract and work in unison to keep you from falling. With the fear of nearing the top, experiencing the room spin around you, heart thumping, mind racing and having no choice but to suck it up and find some way down. I fell in love with how, when you are in the gym surrounded by problems (bouldering routes are called problems), nothing else exists. It’s just you and your hands and feet and the wall. Your only job is to solve (send) the problems you are able to solve (and to save the ones you cannot until next time).

In a lot of ways, bouldering has become a metaphor for how I am striving to live my life. I desire to follow whatever lights me up inside: writing, climbing, spending time in nature. I spend a lot of time examining my fears about living a life I truly love. I realize I have no choice but to suck it up and find a way back to balance. I practice the art of knowing which problems are mine to solve. And I realize that sometimes things find you in the perfect time and it’s okay to get a little lost in that joy.