To Climb is to Live
By Keely Dickes
I clung to the side of the cliff in Acadia National Park, the sun beating on my shoulders and the wind whipping my hair as I pulled hard and stepped high. Somewhere down below I could see a small crowd of hikers, steadily growing. They stood in a clump, mingling and pointing. I could feel their confusion, surprise, and wonder from way up on the rock. I could sense—no, taste—the “Why?” on their lips, the curiosity in their demeanor. Their question was valid. There was no reason for me to be up there. I was removed from everything else, in my own floating orb of movement as I sought out the next place to put my hands and looked down to find a nub for my foot.
Climbing does not serve an explicit purpose, like going to work and making money. Climbing's purpose is best described via its social, physical, and mental benefits. But these are abstract, hard to define ideas that seem to dissipate as soon as you return from the rock face. At that moment tasks with clearer ends come into view: clean the house, cook dinner, go to work. But climbing is like life in that its meaning is what you make of it. We do not know what happens after death; just like the climbing route ends, our days on Earth will end. Climbing teaches you to try hard and to care despite the ultimate transience of everything.
Climbers shamelessly spend months, even years on the routes they’re attempting to climb. They'll obsess over micro-adjustments they can make to polish their movement, maximize their efficiency on the wall until their body is a well-oiled machine, until they are all action and no thought. What the climber wants is to make it to the top of the route without falling.
This desire can keep the climber up at night, or cause her to relive the moves in her dreams as if she were putting together puzzle pieces. It's a strong enough desire to drive some people mad. In fact, from the outside, many non-climbers cannot understand the dedication—no, the obsession. This not-understanding can be seen as a low level assumption of madness; my parents look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them that I keep climbing even after my skin bleeds, throwing chalk in the wound to stop it from getting on the rock. From the outside, of course I'm mad. But climbers understand.
We toil so hard for such a pointless goal, and for the success of such a short moment. We could lower down with a rope into the finishing point and get to the same place, with hardly any effort and a fraction of the time. We could lean a ladder against a boulder and use the rungs to walk right up past the most difficult holds. But that's not the goal. The point is the task of climbing itself.
That's just it. There is no external point, purpose, or reason. Climbing is a microcosm, a closed system, and if you try to expand its relevancy it falters and balks. But this doesn't expose the nullity of climbing's purpose. It illuminates our misconceptions about life's purpose. We do things in life because we believe they have a bigger end, a broader goal.
Aristotle writes about teleology, and human happiness, and the idea that everything we do can be placed in order, like a chain of dominoes or building blocks, to deliver us to happiness. We go to school because we believe we will get a good job, and we work hard at the good job because we believe it will make us money, and money brings security and the ability to sleep at night without worrying about bills unpaid. Supposedly, within that or somewhere not far off, happiness resides. The end of the line. The last link in the chain.
But what we often forget is that the chain will cut off when we die, and there will be no more links to add. Even if you believe in life after death, everyone's earthly chain reaches an end. It's also impossible to determine when that will be. But at that point the foundation for happiness everyone spends so much effort on loses relevancy, as do all the happy moments, like singing at the top of your lungs to the radio with the car windows rolled down, or succeeding on your climb, forearms burning with satisfaction.
There is ultimately no point to so much of what we do in life, because to say life has a point implies that life has relevancy outside of itself. But outside of itself, there may not be anything. There may not be a higher stance or alternate vantage point to look back on your life when it's over and determine how much and why it mattered. And so to say life has a purpose is an impossible statement, and to find that purpose an even more impossible task. We live within life; within its bounds we are stuck, and outside of that there is ignorance which we may never have eyes to see through, nor a body to travel past.
This is the dark corridor where existentialist thought first takes you. Here is where writers like Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus expound on total darkness and inevitable oblivion. It's enough to make the reader feel, as Heidegger describes, a sense of dread. The sense of dread stems from the total, utter realization that life will end and there is no guarantee of a rebirth afterwards. The person feels this dead end preemptively: the body goes still, the mind turns dull, slow, unmotivated. If life will end in forever sleep, why not cut to the chase and start sleeping now? Why waste time awake, moving through the world with liveliness as if we have a shot at forever?
It's because somehow, within the closed system of your life, there is meaning. Meaning lurches up and takes hold of your body, binding itself to you for as long as you breathe and talk and act. It is dependent on you. You sustain it. In this climbing is a microcosm of life, an expression of useless effort and fruitless triumph. In this is its beauty, and it needs no external justification, because just like life, it cannot find one. It exists in the climber's sweat and power screams, the look of determination in his eyes that says he will stop at nothing. In total effort there is freedom, the liberation of trying and caring despite its ultimate irrelevancy. To do that is to be human. To climb like that is to climb free, to climb like a human being.
The essential narratives of the human condition are lived out on the wall. Look closely, and you will see them. The climber is entranced by her own effort, relentless, grunting through a move until on the tenth try it flows like water. She is perfecting herself through this process, becoming more and more acquainted with her body, fascinated by the simple idea of discovering what her body and mind can do when working hard for something. When you strive until you push the limits and break free of them, that is called creating. To climb harder things and to expand your repertoire of movement on the wall is to embody creation. The feeling is exhilarating, fulfilling. Our creations, too, are as transient as our breath. This the climber recognizes more than anyone.
We all have walls in life that will come down with time. There might be a tick list at the end of life that determines success or failure and decides access to eternal existence, but there might not be. If you ever lose sight of how to live, despite this, go to your nearest climbing location and look up. Watch the sweat streaking down the climber's back, hear the labored, eager breathing, examine the mix of pride and determination in their face. Look, listen closely. There is one word for that portrait, one name for that energy: Life. Let's live it while we have it.
Keely Dickes is an American climber and writer, formerly an intern for Rock and Ice magazine. Follow her travels on Instagram @keely.dickes.
