Helloooo~
It seemed like all anyone could talk about last week was the election (or their reaction to it), and the entire campus felt…weighed down by something very, very heavy. After comparing with my friends at various other universities, I confirmed what I suspected: that Wellesley was (and still is) having a very unique response to the election results. Granted, this is to be expected, because we also had a very unique/personal tie to the election candidates.
In an effort to keep moving forward, however, that is all I will dedicate in this blog post to the election; instead, I’d like to share some very happy news with you!
Yesterday, I paid for a climbing gym membership, something I haven’t done for almost two years. I have been in and out of gym climbing, partially for the very good reason of having been at Oxford and having had access to their wonderful mountaineering club and all the outdoor destinations they would climb at (!) but also partially due to having been chained to my job on Wall Street all summer and then feeling too busy at school this semester to go regularly to a climbing gym. But! I have finally caved and gone back to a gym–and it was not as horrible as I’d thought it would be! Ha. I thought after all my wonderful outdoor climbing experiences in England (check my blog posts from the 2015-2016 school year) I would never again be able to climbing on plastic holds on wooden walls in air-conditioned warehouses.
I was proven wrong! Alas, climbing is climbing, and that therapeutic movement of placing one foot higher, reached one hand higher, moving another foot higher, moving your other hand higher…still soothes me after all these years, whether it’s on plastic or real rock. (I’ve been in and out of climbing, both in the gym and outdoors, since I was 12.)
It’s hard to describe what I love about climbing to people who don’t climb. It’s so many things to me. On the one hand, it’s like a dance, a delicate tip-toeing and finger-placing on the wall where equal force and gentleness is necessary, where balance, and not strength, is key. On the other hand, it’s also like solving a puzzle, a brain teaser of sorts. You have to figure out a way to get your body up this wall, up this rock face, ha. You have to use only your fingers and toes to somehow lug 100+ pounds up a strictly vertical (and sometimes overhanging) incline. But there are ways to do this, if you find and use the right handholds and footholds. And everyone ascends a wall differently (especially outdoors, where there are not bright pink or neon green plastic holds dictating your every subsequent move). That’s why it’s like a puzzle. You can figure out your own way of getting up this thing, and it’s completely up to you, it’s your freedom to choose, and you are allowed to choose whichever way fits you best, whichever way makes you the happiest. And it’s satisfying! Satisfying to know you used the right combination of hand and foot movements to maneuver your way up this rock face. That you searched with your eyes, and you read the landscape as you would a novel, and you comprehended and understood–and then you acted. Not only is that satisfying, but the simple feeling of going up and up, slowly but steadily, one foot and hand placement at a time, is also extremely satisfying.
Yesterday, I went climbing with the BOW (Babson-Olin-Wellesley) climbing team. And you know why I was particularly happy to be going with this group of people? Because two years ago, I struggled to form this group exactly! As a sophomore and co-president of the Outing Club at Wellesley, I tried to start a climbing club or climbing team on campus. My friend Katie and I got so far as to organize a group of people who had enough interest in the activity, and go climbing a little everyone once in a while. But we borrowed gear from our friends on the Northeastern climbing team…and didn’t really have transportation to any of the nearby climbing gyms so we ended up making the 2-hour schlepp into Boston for one of the gyms there…and also struggled to get constituted as an official club on campus due to not having had regular “practices” before…
But then I went abroad for a year…and an amazing first year showed up who was very dedicated to climbing (having already won many climbing competitions prior to starting her Wellesley career)…and the club became constituted this fall when I came back…and a little collaboration called BOW had begun quietly last year while I was gone…and voila, suddenly there were 10+ students from Babson, Olin, and Wellesley who were committed to climbing regularly (3-4 times a week), and vans could be borrowed for official club use from Babson, and student membership discounts were negotiated with nearby gyms, and a steady group of students were going climbing together multiple times a week! I found this incredible! And also so extremely satisfying. Although I did none of the actual work of realizing the existence of this group, it makes me happy to know that this group now exists and that I can be a part of it, that people who identify with the same goal and passion for climbing that I had my sophomore year have come together and made this dream come true!
And it was also so nice (I must admit) to just sit back and watch these two other people (one from Wellesley–that first year who has now become a sophomore–and one from Babson) run the team and direct the workouts and lead the climbing sessions…and to be able to just participate like any other member, instead of having to lead the team and organize everything and have responsibilities, which was the case when I was still trying to get the club off the ground my sophomore year…
Anyway, enough pontificating about climbing! I’m sure you never had that much interest in rock climbing to begin with and now I’ve subjected you to a whole blog post and 1008 words of pure climbing blab. I’ll stop here to spare you.
Until next week!
~Em