This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Grief. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I’ve been dabbling at the climbing gym, which bares the uneven benefits of safety.
Uneven, not nonexistent. Fitness teachers and coaches and trainers all have good reasons for counseling patience, stability, a kind of bodily conservatism. They tell you to “modify” postures or actions that don’t work for your body in the moment. Indeed, as the big sign on the wall at the gym says, “CLIMBING IS DANGEROUS.” This is true no matter how careful you are; so best, broadly speaking, to contain the danger.
But in my personal experience of fitness, it’s the rare straight line that runs from safety into growth. I think the same is true in art or relationships or anywhere else that invites ambition. The nature of getting on a bike is that you might break your neck, period. When you sit down to play music for a crowd, you will sometimes forget how the song goes. Love is a whole series of compounding risks. Maybe the physical peril is higher in athletics, but fear lies anywhere.
There comes a moment in some bouldering ”problems”—the colorful routes you take up the wall—when you’ve climbed past the height from which you can safely drop back, even onto the padded surface below, and your only real option is to grip your way up and over the top. Once there, you’ll find a ladder for safely descending. But notice that we’re between two “safelys.” This is a cold and urgent place, one where agency is limited. You must go forward—summoning the will and the strength—or you could be badly hurt.
Accounts of why we bother to approach such thresholds when most times we could as easily not tend toward the reductive. There is no one reason, good or bad. It doesn’t come down to courage or curiosity or compulsion alone. All of these elements are present in the soup of human nature, and they show up in us some way whether we adventure or not.
But here’s a question for the person who creates: Is there something you would hold in the balance with your very life, even for a few moments? Must this be a heavy action?
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.