The Class

My dad used to talk about the inherent problems with the idea of "cause and effect." He argued that if you looked for the cause of an event, you could also ask what caused the first cause, and in turn, what event caused *that* cause and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Eventually, maybe you'd even end up with "God" causing it all but then, who "caused" God? Aha!

I admit, it's a little difficult to not look at the world at least a little bit in terms of cause and effect... You could obviously say that what caused my elbow to shatter (effect) was it hitting the rock (cause).

But to ask what caused me to fall that day, what caused me to climb that day, why I found myself in that particular situation at all, well, that is where there is no clear beginning to this story, no clear cause that set the whole thing in motion.

Why I fell could be as simple as an inability to hold on any longer and the word "gravity." I've come to accept a slightly more complicated explanation in the past year but let's just start with the rock climbing class as one beginning....

In March, I had decided to take a rock climbing class with my then boyfriend. This was a bad idea. Our relationship was on the rocks (pun intended) in a big way. In fact, it had come within a mosquito's whiskers of ending only weeks previous. I deliberated about the decision, for sure, but somehow came to believe that maybe taking a class together about something we both loved (the outdoors) would give us something else to talk about other than us, something else to bond over and could miraculously breathe new life into what was already a pretty battered and beaten relationship. Yes, bad idea. I had reservations about the class from the beginning, not only whether or not we would be able to get along in the class but I also wondered how much I really, truly burned to learn the skill of trad climbing or if somehow, his passion for it had over-ridden my own desires, as tended to happen with us. Maybe I'd just convinced myself that I wanted to learn this skill at that exact point in my life, even though I was incredibly muddled and emotionally exhausted at this point. Regardless, I decided to take the class.

This was a class in how to "lead"; in other words, you're on the end of the rope, climbing up a bare rock with nothing there. It's up to you to put in pieces of pro (short for protection), little metal gadgets that fit nicely into cracks and crevices which you then clip the rope to, should you fall. If you fall, hopefully your well-placed pro holds you, once you travel/fall past the pro and below it where the rope catches on it. So, that means if you climb 10 feet, or 12 in my case, above your last piece of pro and then fall, you're going to fall 20/24 feet plus rope stretch.

I had absolutely enjoyed rock climbing in the past but had only done "top-roping" where the rope is fixed to an anchor above you; if you fall, you only fall a few feet, as long as your belayer knows what he's doing. I'd not really done much rock climbing at all, had always been more of a snow climbing kind of gal, mountaineering and such but had been wanting to 'get more into rock' at some point in life. So why not now? Why not as a way to save a doomed relationship?

Now, this is not a story about the relationship. The relationship is largely why I had reached such a lousy place in my life, I will admit. Trying to make something work that wasn't working was a huge part of feeling so defeated and there's more to say about that, more to be learned. And I hope not to dwell too much on exactly what was going on in that relationship that beat me down so much although it is important to mention as part of what started me growing my wings again- but for now, I'll just make this point, obvious to anyone who's ever had a relationship and obvious to me at the time, only I chose to overlook it: issues in a relationship are not solved by diverting your attention elsewhere, to a project, a class, a child. They certainly are not solved by rock climbing, not even talking about rock climbing. Granted, we did find a few moments of joy here and there, congratulating each other, trying to cheer each other on. But of course, sooner or later, more than a year's worth of resentments just found themselves playing out now in simply a different setting and by mid-April, we'd finally broken up with half the class still ahead of us.

I had entirely planned on finishing the course, as did he, unless it got completely emotionally tortuous; at least I was stubborn enough to give it a try. We were adults, we should be able to interact with each other minimally and finish this thing we'd started. Another bad idea.

However, 10 days after the break-up was the day of my fall, to top off the already completely worn out state I was in. And that was the end of rock climbing for me for a long time....