There are times in our lives when we are expanding the fastest, learning from our environment as quickly we can humanly imbibe these experiences and forging our path through the unknown of the future. In that endless moment, we don’t hold expectations, knowing that nothing is for certain, and we are small in this world.
This flow state is a balance, many factors in many sizes that counter and compliment one another, too many to count. We juggle these factors by tossing them in the air, some remaining in the air far longer than others and changing invisibly, while we catch and toss again those balls that came back to us. These factors may be focused to a balance of art and logic, business and pleasure, the taste of sweet and sour, in the simplicity of black and white.
Since I began climbing, at the age of 7, my life was balanced by the liberation of climbing and the weighted richness of learning. When the two sides are fully grown, dangling on each end of the stick I hold while walking the tight line above the world, I feel the flow: the liberation and richness in balance high on an independent point somewhere.
Here in Mexico I feel those sides balancing again. Almost every year there is moment where I feel light and full at once, with that liberation and richness, and as I sit high and see far from the elevated tip of the see-saw, the world becomes clear for a moment.
Then the see-saw dips to the other side of the fulcrum. For the last 8 months, my ankle has been that fulcrum. My body impacts my mentality more strongly, sometimes, than my mind can impact my body. This is a strong connection athletes feel, grandly unique to people in a stage of a sedentary lifestyle.
When I feel pain, depression laps at the little island of my conscious and awareness dims like the screen on a cell phone, so after a long adventurous day of taking photos and moving non-stop, this ache pulls me from my mind into a cave that I can also explore, but in which I sometimes am lost.
As I become more familiar with this system of caves in the darkness, life becomes easier, and I learn to follow the fresh breeze back to the entrance where my friend self-awareness sits waiting on the other end of the see-saw.
The Alpine Addict 