Work in progress

"Excelsior"

I spent my morning ice climbing. I felt like a medieval warrior,
weilding two razor-sharp ice axes, like twin excaliburs, and donning
stainless steel spikes on my broken-in mountaineering boots.
Feeling much like a sea urchin, I tied into my frozen climbing rope.
My breath was as visible as my misgivings in the cold January morning.
It happens every time: this feeling of "what the #$%^& am i doing
here!"

What am I doing here?
Why do I subject myself to this barbaric, dangerous, cold, wet pastime?

I climbed up about 50 feet, my ice axes skritching and scratching on
the bare rock, like nails on a chalkboard. I longed for the reassuring
"thonk" of a well placed ice tool in deep ice: safety. I continued
this delicate dance toward the sky. Perhaps I was more a dancer than
warrior, my delicate movements finely tuned so as not to shatter the
chandelier ice I was on.

In this twilight zone between control and choas, success and failure,
life and death, I find myself.

Perhaps that is why I climb rock, ice, and snow. When I climb, my mind
is emptied of everything else but the climb. There is simply no room
for distraction. I become lost in my environment of icy blues.

Climbing is a microcosm of life. There are successes and failures, and
every decision has a direct consequence, often amplified by the
immediacy of the decision.

I finally reached the top of the climb, and built an anchor: safety.
success. My urchin-esque, warrior-dancer projection of myself had made
all the right decisions in this microcosm of life. It reassured me
that I can make good, successful decisions in the macrocosm of life.

Now onto higher mountains.

Excelsior: ever upward.