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Do you subescribe to a climbing lifestyle?:
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dingus
Jun 7, 2007, 3:43 PM
Views: 4708
Registered: Dec 16, 2002
Posts: 17398
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A recent thread about retrobolting brought out several caustic and snide comments about the 'climbing lifestyle.' The basic thrust of these comments was that this lifestyle was based on freeloading and dirtbagging and living on the fringes of society, mostly in the 60s and 70s. It suggested that since none of us here really live that way this climbing lifestyle doesn't really exist (for us.). They assert the climbing lifestyle is bogus, an image and nothing more.
Interesting notion, so I gave it some thought. On the surface these comments seem accurate. But I've concluded they are myopic to the extreme... focusing on ONE sort of lifestyle to the exclusion of all else.
I recall a much different conservation, again several of them really - about the same subject. A friend and I were discussing life and climbing and the choices we all have to make and how they affected us.
My buddy, we'll call him Stu, started climbing in the Boy Scouts back in the 70s. He lived the dream for a while, lived in camp 4 for a year (while living off the dole from, get this... Royal Robbins, who had fired him and everyone else from his gear shop in Modesto, hahahahahahaha!). He climbed hard, but he also worked for a living and had kids at a young age. So he was raising a family too.
Me? Climbing since I was 13, fairly active the whole time except for some stretches in the military where cypress trees in the swamps of south Georgia were my only consolation.
Anyway, what we were talking about was 'the professional.' This in the context of work.
It was my contention (still is as a matter of fact) that to be very successful in the business world, to be a CEO or a president of a big company, to rise to those sorts of positions, one must BE that professional 24/7. You have to live, breathe and work the angles all the time. Nothing escapes inclusion either... what's the point of a golf game or a cocktail party unless some deals can be moved down the field at the same time?
I think the reason these folks do what they do is twofold, the first is because that's what they're competitors are doing, and 2ndly, and more importantly, because they love it, or at least think they do.
They live for the deal, get a rush closing a big one and they count coup with their houses, cars, vacation homes (they rarely visit) and the jet set lifestyle.
There's that word again, lifestyle. See, being the BIG DEAL is a lifestyle, its a series of choices that puts one on a certain path. Everything one does from that point is always in reference to the Big Deal, the thing that makes that peson tick. She doesn't have to live and look (thank god) like Donald Trump to be a Big Deal either, there are a billion ways to get rich I suppose.
Now back to climbing and my conversation with Stu. I said, "I can't do that." In reference to the Professionals. "I'm not wired that way. I guess I'm not hungry enough. I don't WANT to be rich. Oh it'd be nice, don't get me wrong, but to GET RICH (legally) one has to be Professional for the most part. HEY! I know there are exceptions, but to be at the head of the line you gotta beat out all those other sonsabitches ya dig? Dog eat dog and all that.
NO! I told Stu,
"I don't want to run a company. Don't want to manage a division. I don't want to manage other people at all, NO REPORTS! I just wanna do my job, make a decent middle class living, not set myself up for obsolescence in my 50s (may have missed that mark, we'll see...), but I did not, do not and won't sell my soul for work.
I'm not that Professional 24/7 kinda guy. When I go home from work? I GO HOME FROM WORK. I leave it all behind. I don' want to worry about making payroll next week, or finding a benefits package our company can afford and our employees can actually use. I don't want to fester on all that work shit every weekend (it intrudes from time to time, I admit it).
What I wan, and what I've always wanted, is to go climbing.
And here's where our conversation turned to lifestyle.
See, for at least 2 decades of my 3 decades of climbing, I worked for the weekend. And on the weekend I went climbing; summer, winter, spring, fall, it didn't matter. All over too, east coast to west.
I'd schedule work in such a way as to maximize 3 day weekends, for climbing. For 20 years my vacations were spent climbing, sometimes ONE ROUTE.
Now I never aspired to rule the climbing world either. I'm a punter quite frankly, lower middle class in climbing as in life. But it was every weekend with lots of bouldering and skiing (skiing is climbing too, in a mountaineering sense), whatever.
My ONLY reason to go to a gym was to stay in reasonable enough shape to climb,
I didn't pursue other sports, couldn't afford them. COULDN'T AFFORD THEM????
Right. I could not afford the TIME they took. The time they would take away from climbing.
All my personal friends are climbers, all of them. I have so little in common with my neighbors we really have nothing to talk about. My garage is chock full of climbing shit.
Stu was like me only worse. We often would get off work at 3 or 4 pm on a Friday and start driving. Sometime late Sunday night we'd come back, tired, worn out but happy.
Its a schizo existence and the very worst one I endured was getting off a wall one day late, huffing it home, packing my suitcase while pondering broken fingernails and aluminum oxide embedded in my skin. And bing bang boom the next morning I was giving a presentation to about 100 people at a major corporation in LA. Made my head swim it did.
But my work choices, where I live, the cars I drive, the clothes I wear, how I married my wife - ALL OF IT centered first on climbing. I've literally turned down promotions that would take me physically from climbing, or worse, threaten the time.
TIME! Its the key component and the thing Stu and I really cyphered on. Time is money. So you're a Big Deal and you're trying to close the next one. Its Friday evening and the proposal is due Monday morning. You're a Big Deal so I already know what you'll be doing this weekend. Spending your time closing that deal.
Me? I don't give a flying fuck if we close that deal or not, not really. And even if I do, I only care 'this much.'
No, this weekend? I'm going CLIMBING!
If that is not a life STYLE then I simply don't know what the term means?
DMT
(This post was edited by dingus on Jun 7, 2007, 3:44 PM)
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Post edited by dingus
() on Jun 7, 2007, 3:44 PM
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