A Non-Helpful Guide to Climbing Cantabaco

One of the hardest things to figure out in rock climbing is knowing when to let go. Often, you let go too soon and, as your belayer hauls you back to the ground, you get l'esprit de l'escalier.

I call it "LDL" because French it such a difficult language. It stands for "staircase knowledge." It's when you come up with a sharp rebuttal when it's too late, when you've already been argued out of your wits or insulted to the point of wishing you'd melt or the other person burns in hell.

The climbing equivalent of that is when you get everything figured out when you have just given up on the route and on yourself. Suddenly, you know which pockets to stick your toes into or which slopes to slap your palms into.

But on the collolary (excuse the academics), you sometimes let go too late. I had a few scary falls because of misplaced self-confidence, courtesy of watching too many climbing videos on Vimeo and Youtube. Sometimes, it's just excessive optimism, brought to me by reading too many Tumblr quotes and that one Carnegie book whose title is lost in my subconcious.

Either way, the price of falling is not death but it does metaphorically and hyperbolically scare me to death. Note that there are some routes where falling could lead to injuries and death (singular, because each person is only entitled to one death). But not the routes I climb because I'd still prefer to live long and prosper. The opposite of living long and prospering is dying young and being viral for a day.

So suicide is pointless because you won't be remembered long for whatever it is you wrote on your letter or Facebook stat before you died. Your story will only be shared for a day and be lost in the creases of this infobesity that we are in. More importantly, killing yourself will not take the pain away--it only passes the pain to more people (I read that somewhere, not my original phrasing).

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I sometimes blog even before I do something. Mainly because I'm too lazy to write plans and writing something in the past tense, about how my day I assume would go, is my equivalent to making a plan. It's sort of prophesizing but not really, because I'm not predicting something. I'm only writing about how I'd want the next day to become only that my narrative's chronological POV is a bit misplaced. I don't know how that makes sense!

Sometimes I get lost in my own loops of thought that my arguments get tangled and become their own counter arguments. And that's the time I let go.