About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call “climbing.”
Basically, you go to a giant place where there are things strategically stuck to a wall, and you grab them with your hands and feet trying to climb to the top of the wall. The things combine to form “routes,” and you can climb short ones with no ropes (“bouldering”) or longer (thus, higher) ones with a rope running from a harness you wear, up through an anchor installed at the top of the route, and back down to someone on the ground who takes up the slack as you climb and then lowers you back to the ground when you’re finished (“top-roping”). You can also do something more advanced (“lead climbing”) where there is no anchor at the top and the person at the bottom doesn’t take in slack as you climb but rather gives you slack as you climb higher with your own rope, which you attach to anchors fixed along the route as you go. (This one I haven’t tried, might never.)[1]
I started doing this because a friend of mine had just lost her spouse, with whom she had climbed regularly. It’s kind of a buddy sport, and I liked the idea of spending more time with this friend, as well as with two other friends who were already climbing together regularly. So we formed a climbing foursome, me the clear novice, but no matter: I learned how to be the person at the bottom, which you can safely do with no climbing skills at all, so in the confines of a “climbing gym” where the advanced courses are right next to the ones that have you basically climbing the rungs of a ladder, my being much worse than the others didn’t hold them back too much. (I did fail my first test to be a licensed person-holding-the-rope-at-the-bottom, but that actually was a great thing to have happened to me, for reasons I can explain in a different post. I passed on my second attempt and have been safely hoisting people up and lowering people down walls ever since.)
My climbing was and is mostly motivated by reasons extrinsic to the actual climbing. I really enjoy spending time with these friends, and I like being with them as they do something they all clearly love and excel at. Those reasons are more than enough for me to want to continue doing this. But I often do idly wonder: Do I, additionally, enjoy climbing?