Its amazing how you can view the world differently when dangling 20 feet up by your abdomen.

I say this in recent light of my rock climbing experience. It's all true too, anger, greed, ambition, strife, gender/racial/ethnic differences and territorial claims all go out the window when all you can see is down. Especially if you're like me and have a fear of falling. Quite possibly the best solution to global conflicts is to take the parties involved, string them 50ft up by their harnesses, and leave them there a while to reach enlightenment.

But anyway back to my story. It all begins with having my friend Dan convincing a bunch of us to go rock climbing. Having done the sport once way back in my youth I was eager to try again. Two alarms that should have immediately gone off in my head where:

1) My heights problem

2) I couldn't tie a knot even if I had a Boy Scout head master holding a gun to my head while yelling me the instructions in clear detail.

After casually mentioning aspect #2 to our instructor I'm sure he and the other climbing instructors made bets as to the size of crater I'd be making in their floors. However I did manage to pass the knotting lesson and we moved on to the climbing lessons. Most of it was basically how to keep the rope taunt so if your climbing buddy comes loose from the wall their harness doesn't give them the wedgie from hell. Then the climbing began. I started off with what I considered a worthy challenge: a 5.2 wall. To put this in proper perspective, a flight of stairs is what would be considered 5.0 wall, whilst many popular roller coasters can be considered 5.10 walls. It was a good, enjoyable warm-up until I ran out of wall. This is when the instructor told me to let go of the wall. HELL NO. The advantage of climbing when you are afraid of falling is you will manage to put an iron clamp hand grip on anything no matter how small. It could be the size of a marble but by God, that's one marble that'll have permanent finger imprints. Fighting over 3000 years of human evolution that has taught us that letting go and falling is a bad thing I willed myself to let go of my handholds. This brings us back to where I started this rant because after letting go I wasn't lowered down. No, It was now time for part 2 of our lesson, which I'm assuming could only be taught with the climber held in a state of suspense.

After 10 minutes of having the instructor tell my rope man, Lee, how to let me down safely (5 of which I spent gnawing at my rope because the the harness was digging into my crotch) I was finally lowered to the sweet earth and changed places with my rope man. It was now his turn to do a 10 minute crotch dangle.

Our lesson completed we where given free reign to have our ego's put us in situation our bodies couldn't handle. One such wall happened to be a 5.11 with a handhold which had a cluster of bulbous formations we called "the grapes". The challenge was to see who could reach the grapes first, and because there was not a female amongst us to implore reason, there was a monetary bet as well. Being of small frame both myself and Dan's cousin (also by the name of Dan) had the advantage over our rope men and the challenge soon became between the both of us. We all did other walls, however we still kept coming back to the grape wall in a contest to see who's harness was bigger. Eventually it became not a challenge between myself and 3 of my friends but a personal vendetta against the ones who had erected the wall with no viable handholds in the first place. I learned that day that ego goes well against fear/reason when it come to pushing one to make impossible leaps of faith when teetering on a foothold. Eventually the multiple sieges took their toll on my hands, which could no longer operate a quarter let alone swing me from one side of the wall to the next, and I was forced to concede defeat.

For now at least.

Dan's cousin walked away with the boasting rights of making it the closest to the grapes, however we have vowed to return to break his record. Since then my gym exercise routine has been doubled (once a week to twice a week) in order to prepare myself for the rematch. Ah the wonders that ego can drive us to...