How to let go of failure and jump into your fall
i
stared straight ahead refusing to look
up at a wall
that loomed above me
something gripped my stomach like a
block of concrete
my hands were sweating and i could hear
my heartbeat
ringing in my ears my body
was frozen i couldn’t go on any longer
and it’s not that i couldn’t physically
go on but
mentally i flat out refused
but i hadn’t quite admitted that to
myself yet
the thought of losing all of this
progress
just didn’t quite appeal to me and yet i
was stuck
in this moment too scared to go on but
too scared to let go i was facing
this inevitable fall
now this might sound a little strange
coming from someone who spends
a lot of time in the vertical world
as a professional rock climber i’ve
often found myself
roped into walls that are thousands of
feet high
in places like yosemite california
or the andean mountains in peru
i’ve also been unroped on climbs up to
50 feet high
in places like bishop california but
also
australia south africa and brazil
in each one of these places for each one
of these climbs the goal is always the
same
just get to the top and in climbing
across the board
the goal is to get to the top but there
is a slight difference between
climbing a wall and climbing say a big
mountain like everest
if you’re gunning for everest you want
to try and choose the easiest way
possible because
no matter which way you choose it’s
going to be a long
hard slog but when you’re climbing a
wall
climbers tend to choose the hardest way
on purpose
even though there’s almost certainly an
easier way of the back
people are always coming up to us and
saying
you know there’s stairs around the
corner right you can just
walk to the top but despite this
climbers choose the hardest way because
to some degree
we seek out that failure
we know we’re going to fall we expect it
and we know that it’s going to be scary
which makes sense right a fear of
falling is a natural human instinct
but it’s also a skill that can be
trained and practiced
if you just take a few small falls at
first go into some bigger ones
and learn that when you fall you’ll be
okay
but despite knowing this climbers
most climbers do not practice falling
we’re so focused on the top and since
climbing is part of the deal anyways
we’d rather concentrate on the positive
of moving upwards
versus the negative of falling backwards
we figure we’ll just
deal with the fall as it happens
but now visualize with me for a second
close your eyes
and imagine you’re holding on to
something
really tight you’ve worked hard to get
there
but your body is getting tired
and you feel yourself weighed down
and there’s a growing anxiety in your
chest because
you know that fall is coming and because
you know the fall is coming
a fear bubbles up that makes you hold on
even tighter that fear
keeps you there for a little bit longer
but it’s not enough to keep you going
and when this happens to climbers on the
wall we have strategies to manage this
fear
we take a deep breath relax our body
lower our heart rates and reconnect our
mind to ourselves
and regain enough strength to keep going
but these strategies don’t work every
single time
and at some point we’re going to have to
take the fall and in climbing
and really life in general there’s this
idea that progress
is linear and that in order to be
successful you have to keep going up and
you have to make it to the top
and when you fall you fail
so what happens when you’re scared of
that failure
and you avoid it at all costs
i found myself thinking about all of
this a little subconsciously maybe
as i stared at my own wall the one that
was so big
i couldn’t bring myself to look up at it
all i could do was look straight ahead
at the features in front of me the
dimples of concrete painted over in
white
this big scary wall was my dorm room at
the university of rhode island
it was spring of 2010
and i was halfway through freshman year
facing a round of midterms i had not
studied for
notes and textbooks piled up behind me
the stairs i could conceivably use to
just walk on out of this situation
but i chose the harder way and i kept
staring at this wall
beating myself up thinking about what i
should be doing
in that moment i should be studying
i should be pushing through i should be
sticking out this whole college thing
because
that’s what you’re supposed to do right
but something didn’t feel right to me
i had hit this wall figuratively and
literally
where i could not go on any longer
but dropping out of school was the
failure
and the fall that i didn’t want to face
now over the course of my climbing
career i’ve stood on top of hundreds of
climbs
and experienced hundreds of successes
and for each one of those successes i’ve
taken a thousand falls
and a thousand failures at this point
i’ve learned that after i let go and as
i’m falling i position my body in
mid-air
so that when i land i can minimize the
force of impact
i also know that even though i’ll land
farther from where i started
it’s better than staying in one place
and wasting energy
the minute you let go even though you’re
moving backwards
at least you’re moving towards another
chance to try again
so when i let go of school in 2010
i was scared i had been holding on to
something so
tight something that i wasn’t fully
committed to
but the minute that i did let go i
positioned my body
i positioned myself in the general
direction
of something that gave me purpose and
made me happy
i tried something different for a while
i went climbing for years
and faced the very real fear of falling
again
and again and after a while
i returned to school to face that same
exact fear
in a slightly different context and from
a different perspective
now this spring of 2021
i will graduate from the university of
colorado here in boulder
for me going back to school was not a
failure redeemed but just an opportunity
revisited i wanted to take the lessons i
had learned from climbing
and apply them in a totally new
environment
but you don’t need 20 years of climbing
experience
to figure out how to fall everyone
has the ability to let go
and try again it might feel a little
uncomfortable at first
which is fine now is the perfect time to
practice
so i challenge you to think of something
you’ve been holding on to
something that’s weighing you down maybe
a decision
that gives you a little bit of anxiety
in your chest when you think about it
i ask you to take a deep breath
relax your body and imagine
what it might be like to let go
and take that fall to jump into it even
trust yourself to move in whatever
direction that may be
because wherever you land you can always
look up
and try again