climbing

Doing nothing is glorious, and amidst the backdrop of home, it feels even more fully nothing because this is a place where I just am--not a place I worked to get to, not a place I remember adjusting to, not a place I had to populate with furniture. My little over a day back has been spent eating, sleeping and driving. Fremont is a beautiful town with its neat green trees and long stretches of fences shielding yellow fields from the school roads. It's a suburb, with nothing of note to show a newcomer; it's not a destination for anyone; it's just a sequence of events that made it so I would know its beauty. The sun drenches through all openings in our house, and somehow the sun feels different in different places, such that nothing makes me feel quite the same way I feel when my mom pulls the blinds up so the kitchen is bright so she she can make soy bean milk from real soy beans. I love to drive here, with the easy streets and the comfort of windows down. The mangoes are sweet.

Doing nothing really does feel like breathing, after such concentrated time of working hard for concrete things, and for looser periods of time of living for generalities. After this vacation, I will be rusty at that underlying gradually forward progression, but I think too I'll be a little stronger, because constant movement, however balanced and however enjoyable, needs rest.

It's odd how even as much as we need it, our bodies sometimes give us a hard time for taking a break. My roommate and I started rock climbing a few months ago, and it's hard. It's not as easy as it looks to climb a wall; it's also more satisfying than it looks. A lot of it is about building through continuous tries, and we've improved in tangible ways. But once, we returned after a two week hiatus, and found ourselves struggling with what had been easy before. It sucked. I turned to her and asked, why can't it ever just be enough? Why do we always have to keep trying? She laughed, looked at me and said, are you still talking about climbing?

As achievers we run on having something to achieve, and so there is always something more to work for. And having done something once isn't always a guarantee that it will be easy the next time, when you've a gap in between the times. It can be alternately trying and refreshing to never have an end, and I like how climbing combines these sensations and the combination is visceral and mental, and as a result, filling. Part of this is because there are little ends that you can see; each climb ends somewhere and sometimes you make it. When your arms exhaust themselves, which always happens sooner than you realize, and each move is a struggle and every try is only making you weaker and less likely to reach the next hold--you don't make that end, but in those cases, you're glad to know it's not the end.

The moments of completing this climb and of trying for more aren't always clearly defined, and that seems to make sense. And while too long between tries can be hard, so is too little time, as I remember from the day after two consecutive climbing days, when doing absolutely nothing made my arms scream with ache. Perhaps as we get better, the threshold for too short will get slimmer, for too long wider. In things that are continuous, I find a lot of flexibility in the boundaries, and there's a lot to be had in all parts of it.