Patience
Patience may not be a word you associate with rock climbing. Usually it’s:
Fear!
Adrenaline!
The Top!!
I don’t know about you, but those words make me feel like moving fast! When I leave the ground afraid, the adrenaline starts flowing almost immediately and if, if, if I make it to the top without falling, I won’t remember a single moment of the climb. No room for sweet patience.
This summer I was blessed to climb with an old friend and watching him work a route reminded of the beautiful practice of patience. His first attempt at the climb was by no means an onsight. While the route was well within reach for my friend in terms of grade, tiny fingers and dime-sized feet spit him right off the crack at the obvious crux. He had placed enough gear, and well, so the fall was safe and low-drama. I could tell he was disappointed, but stayed cheerful and supportive when it was my turn to climb. I decided to toprope, and was impressed with my own clean ascent, but that’s a less educational story :)
We had shade, we had time and we were having plenty of laughs, so it just made sense for him to get on the climb again. Let me tell you the story of his second attempt where Patience was the star.
The crack spilt the granite at a pretty strong angle so I had left a few pieces of gear in the crack as directionals to keep my partner close to the route if he fell on top rope. While I was on toprope I had taken out the gear in the crux itself so he could move quickly through that section on toprope without having to fidget with any gear. Leaving the right pieces of gear was a gift I’d intentionally given my friend.
Before jumping right back on, he asked me a lot of questions. I knew he had watched my top rope closely, memorizing my sequence and which footholds I had used, but it was still helpful to him to hear what my experience had been. Was there a finger lock he had missed? Were there any secret holds inside the crack? I was happy to share what I remembered from the route, because I wanted him to do well his second go.
A few opening moves deposited him just below the crux sequence. I watched him take a big breath in, and exhale, unwinding his body up the crack.
And another fall.
This time his frustration was more apparent. He asked me to lower him back to the start of the crux, where he hung in space collecting himself. He complimented me on my top rope, because now that he had fallen both on lead and top rope, the true difficulty of the climb had revealed itself.
I gave him his space to calm down, and in the stillness of the afternoon, the two of us alone at a semi-obscure crag, I could just barely hear him mumbling to himself 20 feet in the air above me. He was shaking his head and running his hands through his hair with the wind and saying to himself, “Just have patience, man.”
Patience! What an unexpected thing for me to hear. No anger or complaint, just sweet, simple patience. In our moment of calm I started to piece together how patience fit into his game. I had watched him patiently place perfect gear, I had watched him patiently and thoroughly ask questions about my beta. And now I was watching him patiently hang in space, his breath and heart rate evening out, sensations returning to his fingertips and toes. I watched him go to a place deep within, eyes closed, head bowed, patient with his own process on this route. More mumbling, and other deep round of breath. Unweighting the rope, he shot his feet out to the tiny face holds and I could almost hear the bones in his fingers rearranging themselves to fit in the tiny crack. He looked down at his feet, he peered into the crack, and I will tell you he moved through that crux like a damn flower unfolding which is to say immaculately, inevitably, like nature.