Looking Forward

In the process of looking back on my past, when I was beginning to accept all the ramifications of my rock climbing accident, and when I finally started to accept that there was no way I could change it, no way I could go back and make different decisions, that empty sort of surrender was partially made more bearable by the hypothetical ability to prevent a similar misfortune from befalling others in my outdoor community.

Somehow, if what I learned from my experience could be worth something to someone else, maybe it could feel less like a misfortune and more like an opportunity; my loss, their gain.

To draw again on the philosophy of embracing both loss and gratitude, I am reminded of the many times I've been told by friends or family, "In the Japanese language, the same character is used for both the words 'misfortune' and 'opportunity'." I am also reminded of the yin and the yang, the dark and the light. While I don't necessarily have control over the 'dark,' over the loss, at least in some ways I feel like I have some control over the 'light,' the gratitude, the 'opportunity.'

So equally for my own healing and in an effort to try and make something positive of a difficult experience, I recently showed up as guest speaker for this year’s current students in the “Advanced Rock” class which I was taking when I fell.

Each year, there is a safety lecture and this year it was entitled, “To Make Aware, Not Scare.” Because I had heard through the instructor that there would be many examples of accidents had by AR students, most of who fell on non-difficult terrain simply because “they lost focus,” I was afraid that my accident, too, would be framed with that approach: that I’d simply lost focus.

And because I'd often thought of going back to the AR class to speak, there was a certain amount of anticipation building up. I went in almost wondering if I would need to defend myself and explain how my fall wasn't due to just simply losing focus- that actually, I'd been quite focused that day. Having been through a fairly serious accident, I found it difficult to hear others explain away accidents simplistically, especially when it was about just being in the wrong headspace.

I wanted mostly to talk about the value of fear and respecting one's limits. I had remembered many a discussion during the year I took AR about how to get past one's fear of climbing. It had been rather simplified as, "just breathe and smile." Throughout the class, because of my own fear of heights, I'd struggled with finding a balance between respecting my limits and having a "healthy amount" of fear (that amount is something of which I'm not certain) versus challenging myself and trusting the system. Even before I fell, I resisted all the simplistic talk.

So I told my story.

I explained how the whole thing unfolded- how ironically, I'd been incredibly careful for the duration of the course and then in a moment of feeling strong, I "went for it" and that's when I fell. I talked about how I personally believed that being a beginning leader was not necessarily the best timing for challenging one's climbing technique and skill. And I shared the ways I felt I had misjudged the situation and what I would do differently if I could. I showed x-rays of before and after.

And most of this time, I was shaking.

I don't know why I was nervous. All I really wanted to say was, "don't do what I did," which was an instinctive reaction, but yet I knew it was much more complicated than that; my story was not about one wrong decision existing in a vacuum.

It's our human nature to want to simplify things and make them more black and white than they may actually be. This is also where our cause/effect thinking gets the best of us. Still, in the end, I think the theme of my presentation was to carefully consider the consequences when deciding to lead something unless one has total confidence in their ability to make it to the top without a chance of falling. That was really how I came to sum up my fall, complicated as it was: in that moment, I lost sight of the consequences of not being able to make the last move, considering that my last piece of pro was almost 10 feet below me.

I wasn't entirely sure how my presentation was received; it certainly was much more straight-forward than all the times I'd imagined it in my head. There were thank-yous and smiles from familiar faces. There were some questions about the details of the accident. I summed it up with, "be careful out there."

And then as I was leaving, the main speaker of the evening, the man who started the class back in the 70s, found me in the hallway.

"I'm so glad you said what you said in there," he began, which immediately melted any last butterflies or any thoughts I'd had of "did what I say amount to anything?"

I don't remember the details of how he elaborated the point after that, but I was relieved that my challenging of the "just breathe and smile" approach had not fallen on deaf ears.

The golden nugget of the evening was the last thing he said to me before he left; it was something I'd fought for and worked hard at.

He said, "That experience you had out there, that accident- it sounds like quite the day, that maybe you even cheated death that day. And that rock might have broken your elbow, but it's clear that it sure didn't break your spirit. "

And with that, I finally took a deep breath, maybe the first of the evening.

It didn't break my spirit....

Of course, I already knew this on some level. It wasn't the first time I'd heard this. Hell, I was cracking jokes with the anesthesiologist on the operating table, regardless of how scared I was. But I think hearing this from an outsider- someone who really didn't know me, as opposed to a friend of mine- meant a lot. I felt a part of my insides relax.

I don't know that I will go back to future AR classes to give that same talk, to tell my story. Maybe I will. But there was something in me that needed that opportunity particularly this year, the first class since the whole thing, as the one year anniversary approaches.

Finally, I came to accept that it was okay if what I said didn't have any effect. Attached as I may have previously been to the idea of turning this obstacle into an opportunity, specifically by preventing anyone else in AR from falling, I realized that you don't get a message through by shaking the audience by the collar, but by planting a seed and walking away.

Regardless of whether my presentation mattered or not, it was still a step for me, another step towards the opportunity of this story- another chance to continue to look forward, looking for the light.