CFC Blog #68: Believing It'll Happen

One of my favorite sayings, that actually one of my sister's once shared with me is.. Our life is a creation of our mind. Lauren, your writing reminds me of this quote, and it also gets my adrenaline running juuust a lil bit. Thank you for sharing your experience, and for the awesome picture too.

Mind > Matter :) 

- Amanda

Believing It'll Happen

Not long ago, I went to a bouldering gym in New York with two friends. One of my favorite things about climbing is how communal it is, and on this particular day a group of people had gathered around one course, lining up to try it and cheering strangers on. It was very simple, consisting of only four holds – one large one near the group with a flat top, two smaller holds on the sides of it, and then a larger ledge straight above almost reaching the top of the wall. The only way to finish the course was to step on the one below with one foot while grabbing the smaller holds, swinging your body towards and away from the wall, and then jumping up to grab ahold of the top ledge with both hands. The only way to finish was to psych yourself up, believe that you could do it, and jump with the momentum with both arms straight up.

I thought about this yesterday when I was hiking across a glacier on the Jungfrau mountain in Switzerland where I am currently on vacation. Our guide was an experienced climber and pointed across the blinding white frontier to a range of rocky granite mountains. He explained how once you climbed up the flat face and reached the top, you had not even a foot of path to walk along to come back down. On either side of you is the flat face of the mountain, where you would plummet straight down to your likely death. The only way to walk across the top of the range, he said, was to truly, truly believe that you could do it.  (See picture of me with said mountains, thinking about how I prefer my New York climbing gym.)

To say that if you put your mind to something you can do it sounds cliché, but there really is truth in wholeheartedly believing that something will happen to the point where it does. And in a world that is so small that I can see sand from the Sahara Desert yellowing patches of snow on a glacier in the Swiss Alps (actually!), this opens endless possibilities for what we all can do.