California Recap

I just spent a week in California climbing in the Sierra and in Yosemite. I'd tell you all about how great it was, how sick the climbing was, how splitter the weather was.....blah blah blah, but then I'd be a bro-gnar killing you with lingo bombs. I don't want to do that. So what the hell am I going to say about it? Here's what:

I just went from being frazzled and busy and stressed out to living entirely in the moment for a week. The trip in CA was almost more of a retreat from the hubbub and hoodoo of day to day life than an excuse to get out and climb. Don;t get me wrong, though. It was still a fantastic excuse to climb. But I'll keep those stories confined to the exchanges between other climbers and myself.

Before I left, my brain was going seven different ways, and I was having a hard time keeping it all straight. Kate and I were trying to figure out where we were going to live in Boulder. I was studying for the GMAT's while debating if I even wanted to go to business school, let alone the most efficient way to add and multiply fractions of the circumference of a circle in a graph. My boss was frantically trying to get work finished because he would be out of town for the last two weeks of August, so projects were flying at me left and right. And finally, another job I've been doing for another client was exploding just before he left for a big trade show. I sound like one of those idiot squawk boxes who talks trash about how many TPS reports have to go out the door, but I'm trying to tell you I was too busy to eat. Honestly, have you met my skinny ass?

So while I had this whole array of work/study/life issues coming my way, my mind was never really centered on one task at hand. If I was studying for the test, I was worried about how I'd finish the map work for my job. If I was driving to some rural podunk hellhole to run title on a project, I'd be pissed I wasn't studying. If I was worrying about work or studying, I sure wasn't thinking about where Kate and I would move to, and this relationship insouciance left some troops sharpening their bayonets. When the week finally wrapped up, I had done a mediocre job on everything. Passable, but not extraordinary. Then, it was off to Reno.

As soon as I landed, my mind began to focus on what I'd be doing for the next week. Climbing. Traveling. Moving. And that was it. Purity of thought, and a victory for the uncluttered mind. I could finally afford to concentrate on what I was doing at that moment. And that alone is really the reason I like to climb. I've never found anything else that forced me to concentrate and forget distractions. When I was climbing on the Incredible Hulk, I wasn't thinking about anything except the rock at my toes and fingers, the crack I'd stuffed my knuckles into, and the next ledge where I could stop and bring Rob up to the belay. It was perfect.

I spent an entire day on the wall, 7AM to 6PM, followed by a descent via rappel, gully, and scree field. When we finally got back to the bivy site after 14 hours, I was totally wasted. I realized as I crawled into my sleeping bag after dinner that I hadn't thought of anything outside of the valley where we were climbing for a day. My mind was perfectly focused, and I realized that if I could have had that kind of ability to concentrate before I'd have left for California, maybe I'd have scored better on the GMAT, been more helpful to Kate as we looked for a house, and done a better job at work. And now that I'm back, all I can think about is going climbing again. Maybe I didn't learn a lesson after all.

OK, I am going to post this before any editing because Nuno wants something to read at work, so if there are typos, lazy sentences, or shit that just doesn't make sense, blame the Portuguese.