You Can Climb

You can’t fail to see the connection... the title has been totally inspired and motivated by the famous TV shows: You Can Dance and Yan Can Cook. I wish we had a TV show ‘You Can Climb’ with me as the host and three celebrity judges including Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. Perhaps some hotshot daredevil TV show producer would read this post and get equally inspired to boost his TRP right to the top and get my idea off ground. But only on one condition, JR and MR have to be in it. So this post is for that elusive TV show producer / director, for JR and MR and finally for all you lovely people out there who are the intended participants and live or TV audience when the show is finally aired. Join me guys; let’s do some climbing aka fun style.

If I can climb, so can you; anyone can climb. You, your parents and grandparents, your siblings, your friends, your uncle and cuckoo aunts, your teachers, your priests, your grocery shop fellow, your newspaper boy, your house help, your doctor, your banker, your insurance agent, your author, your reader, your taxi driver, your milkman, your partner, your kids, your tailor, your barber... and just about anyone that you can ever think of or have ever known... can all climb. I mean, come on, even elephants can climb real vertical rocks.

If you are a ‘human’ reader of this post then please believe me that you can most certainly climb. While if you are not a human reader (except if you are aquatic) then you can most certainly climb even better.

What is a ‘climb’ anyway?

Let’s get inside that mother of all dictionaries and find out what our past visionaries, forefathers of modern thoughts had to say to define ‘climb’: go upward with gradual progress / move with difficulty by gasping / improve one’s social status / increase in value. There are many more definitions and connotations of the word but these will more than suffice for me to make a statement. My surmise is that you all can climb derives out of my observation that ‘climbing’ is one of human’s fundamental and rudimental design features, both of mind and body; quite akin to breathing, sleeping, eating. It’s a natural part of being human.

To climb is human.

You and I, we all are doing it all the time, consciously or not, you are engaged in it every day of your life. We are born climbers but we tend to lose the skill and awareness as we grow up. Ask any parent of a newly born kid, ask your mom how good were you as a toddler in climbing inside and outside of troubles, in climbing to places you were not supposed to be and to go beyond the highest summits that your mom had thought you were capable of surmounting and therefore finding that cookie jar hidden above the topmost kitchen shelf.

Going back to the definitions we can string them into one statement: to climb is to go upward progressing gradually and moving with difficulty along with gasps here and there in order to improve one’s social status thereby increasing one’s intrinsic value. This is the best way I can define what I do. I climb upwards mostly, progressing real slow and real steady, gradually moving up with great difficulty, gasping and gaping, thus moving up the social ladder (who would know me in the society if I wasn’t a climber?) and eventually augmenting my intrinsic or fundamental value. I do this literally and so do many of my climber friends while all of you do this figuratively and naturally.

But in our TV show we can’t only be talking figuratively, audience will boo us out and my producer and I would be jobless in a week. So get going with the reality show. Most of you, at some point of time, should have seen (in a picture) a climber hanging from the tip of his fingers hooked in a tiny crack on a wall of rock or another stuck like a fly on a gigantic vertical dizzying piece of ice. You might have seen a survival or climbing epic documentary in one of the TV channels or read about these insane climbers in the net. Climbing obituaries are an interesting collection of people who climbed till they could not or did not. While I am a potential candidate for these obituaries, let’s look at the simple steps. How it all begins, which you can do, and which is never shown in a picture or in a movie and we seldom talk about.

To climb you need a surface sloping upwards against gravity. That’s the difference between walking and climbing – the surface angle and gradient. You will find such a surface just about anywhere, if not naturally (if you are Dutch) then artificially upon a flight of stairs. Then you need to observe and contemplate the rising surface in front of you like a Buddhist monk, in order to calm your adrenalin pumping limbs and heart. Take a deep breath and then take the first step let go of ‘horizontal’ space. And then follow your first step with your next keeping a steady pace and step length to match your physical dimensions and flexibility. After few such steps your body will get tuned to the activity and then you would be climbing like you used to as a child. It will become an act of instinct rather than one of intent.

So what are you waiting for people? Get on with your climbing shoes, get out and begin to climb and in doing so go up the social ladder and enhance your intrinsic value. The TV show auditions would begin soon in all the major countries in the world and I want you all to turn up by the hordes to make our lives absolutely unenviable. While I am now setting up a meeting with the managers of JR and MR. 

See you all on top!