Anxiety, Rock Climbing and Making Choices.

My son climbing c.2016

June 3, 2022

I recently read a book called Use Your Words by the Australian writer and comedian Catherine Deveny. It's all about getting out of your own way and doing the work you need to do. As Catherine is a writer it’s from the perspective that the work you want to do is write something.

There are loads of inspirational people who write, tweet or podcast about how to get the thing that you want to do done and I’ve read a few of them because I'm endlessly fascinated by stuckness and how we humans get in our own way and set up roadblocks for ourselves, because I am really good at that!  But reading this book my thoughts keep drifting not to my creative process and procrastination but to rock climbing and anxiety.

When my son was 14 he participated in a semester of rock climbing with his high school sport and recreation program. He loved it and being naturally athletic he excelled super quickly and it became a fixture of his after school time. I would take him and stay and watch. One day he didn’t have anyone to climb with and asked if he could teach me how to belay so that, you know if no-one better was around to climb with I could step in!

As any parent of teenagers will tell you finding activities that you can actively participate in with your kids can be a challenge and so I jumped at this opportunity to get out of the stands and actively spend time with my teenaged son doing something that he loved. Important to note, I had no intention of ever actually climbing a wall. Standing on the ground feeding and pulling rope I could manage, but the idea of moving off the ground terrified me. I have had a nausea inducing fear of heights ever since I can remember and looking up at those walls had my heart pumping and my toes curling. Staying on the ground was fine with me.

Then one of those parent-child role reversal scenarios happened. You know those moments when your kid turns around and looks at you and says that thing back to you that you’ve just spent the last gazillion years saying to them. In this instance that was something along the lines of, “…how will you know you can’t do it if you don’t give it a go?” followed by this pearl of teenage wisdom “…if you don’t confront your fear how can you overcome it?”  Yeah, umm Ok.

That was such a huge trigger for me.  As I’ve written about before I had lived a lot of my life scared of doing stuff. Getting really anxious and using it as an excuse to not do things. Yet as a parent I’d really put lots of energy and emphasis on telling my children not to be like that. Yeah, I know, they see what you do, and that gives them all the information they need! So there it was, the incongruence of my talk and my actions colliding and being given back to me through the voice of my teenager.

Now I’m a huge proponent of the notion that we always have choices available to us. At times they can seem overwhelmingly difficult to make. Sometimes the range of choices can be very sparse and the choice is between something shitty and something not so shitty. Often our choice is limited to our own thoughts. Yet there’s always an element within every situation which we choose, Viktor Frankl said it best when he wrote:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

So there it was, I had a choice to make.  I could continue to live my life scared of heights, I was well aware this was one of those ‘this activity is a metaphor for the rest of my life’ moments, or I could feel absolutely bloody terrified, and have a go at climbing the wall anyway. I climbed the wall. My hands were so sweaty I needed a ton of chalk, I could hear my pulse in my ears, throwing up felt imminent, my legs didn’t seem to want to move and the dizziness was almost overwhelming. But I made a choice and I climbed that wall anyway.  And then I climbed another one.

That first dizzying half wall, climb was in 2014. Years later and I’m still climbing. I still get anxious when I go to climb and I’m not exactly awesome at it, but that’s not the point. I get so much more out of feeling my anxiety and allowing myself the space to move in to it, rather than running away from it, than can be measured by style and technique and graded climbs. Embracing this allowed something else to happen. Gradually I realised that I rarely feel those same levels of anxiety in my every day life that I used to. As a result I have space to do things that I always wanted to do, but had stopped myself from doing because of fear.

Which brings me back to the book I’m reading.  You see whether it’s writing, or climbing or what ever other thing it is that you want to do, there will always be an element of fear. There’s always going to be a block or moment of stuckness. There’s always going to be that moment when you have the choice to quit. The important thing, as Deveny writes, is learning “to keep going even when it seems impossible: that’s a gift.” There is always that space to choose our response, both on the wall and off.

Every climb has its crux. It can be a gift.