Last week, I think it was Tuesday, Dave and Will and I met up at Mission Gorge to do some rock climbing; my first time out in more than a year. Climbing used to be life itself. There is something about youth, about budding self-realization and defining one’s identity, that can easily create a sorta constant anxiety. A preoccupation with the past and nagging by one’s parents, teachers, and family about the future leaves very little time to enjoy all that is around you. This, to me, is youth: you develop an identity, you try and redefine your past to fit it, and then - at a ridiculously young age - you come up with a life plan to make your parents smile.

Rock climbing was an escape from all this constant looking backwards, looking ahead, self-analysis, figuring shit out. Rock climbing was meditation in its truest sense: complete self awareness. When you’re 100 feet off the ground with your feet on a ledge a quarter’s width, it’s hard to be aware of anything else but yourself.

Of course it was also about getting in shape, about pushing myself physically and mentally, about being with friends, about trusting my life to the person belaying me, about weekend trips to Idyllwild and Red Rocks and Joshua Tree. It was about all of this, but what really brought me back to the rock time and time again was the mindless sensation of living purely by instinct of survival. Because rock climbing is often the hobby of graduate students and weekend warrior software programmers, it’s depicted as the intellectual’s sport. Which is ironic since - to me anyway - the whole point of climbing is to completely lose the intelect. Like good sex or a pint of ice cream after smoking a bowl, it’s a completely sensory experience. It’s escape … and we all need it every now and again.

So I was trying to figure out what happened, why I had stopped all of a sudden even after the investment in costly equipment. Here’s what I came up with:

1. You get older, your interests broaden. I mean, all throughout the last year and a half I had thought to myself how I’d like to go climbing. But then, I wanted to do a lot of things, and time has become more and more precious as the years roll by.
2. Climbing easily turns from a sport or hobby into a lifestyle. You begin to hang out with other climbers, dress like a climber, talk like a climber, eat like a climber.
3. Unlike basketball or soccer, where you can easily find a pickup game to play for a half hour, climbing almost always turns into an all day - or at least half day - affair.
4. Most SD climbers are 9-5ers and then swarm the local crags on the weekends. Finding a partner to climb with during the week is tough. Finding a route to climb on the weekend, more so.
5. Finally, climbing was definitely a form of therapy for me. And as time has gone by, as I’ve become more comfortable with who I am and less concerned with who people want me to be, that therapy isn’t as necessary. Which is not to say it’s not helpful, that’s it not still a form of therapy - last week I discovered that it very much still is and that I hope I keep it up. But that level of desperation for non-reflective meditation just isn’t the same now as it once was.

I guess this was the long about way of me saying that I’ve put up a new gallery in the photography section dedicated to climbing pictures over the past five years. I still have to enter in the titles and there are a lot of other pictures I need to scan in and add, but for now, if you’re interested, have a look around.