What's easy and what's right.

Sometimes I wish I had someone else’s obsession. Like, maybe I could be a fanatical gardener. Maybe I could be fixated on mentoring youth or volunteering at homeless shelters. But no, I’m obsessed with climbing, which is certainly a net negative in terms of environmental impact, and the social impacts are… questionable.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but struggled to put my thoughts on the page. Fortunately, Sonnie Trotter, proprietor of probably the most consistently interesting pro climber blog, is here to do some of the work for me. Writing about his time at the annual Outdoor Retailers winter show (amidst musings on Bob Dylan, becoming, and climbing new routes):

“I had lunch in the convention center, pressed for time, a bad move on my part, and the food came in a thin, cheap, plastic container. I used it for about 4 minutes, then needed to dispose of it, arghhh! There were thousands of other attendees at the show, and they too needed to eat. I asked around where the recycling was, nobody had a clue. Not even the organizers…

“I wish we didn’t have to choose, I wish, what was right was always right before us…What I learned (again) is that if you want to help people do good things, one must make doing good things easy.”

That rings true for me, and I’m guilty of doing the easy thing many times over when doing the right thing would have taken more time or effort. I’m hopeful that I will get better and doing what’s right, and teaching my son to do the same, but I have no doubt that I will continue to do what’s easy at least some of the time. This will be true in the super market and it will be true on the rock.

I should say that my goal here is not to cast gloom over a thing I love to do. I think my goal is to better understand why I make the choices I do in the interest of making better choices in the future. I want (maybe need) to keep climbing, but I also want to understand what compromises I’m willing to make to do so. I buy gear that uses incredibly energy intensive materials that are shipped thousands of miles across the globe. I drive a couple hours for a day of climbing without a second thought.

Life is about drawing lines. Deciding what we will and won’t do. Deciding how to balance our wants and our needs with what’s best for others. Balancing the short term with the long term. I don’t know where to draw the line in my climbing life, how to balance my desire to climb against the impacts of my climbing, but I don’t want to throw up my hands and ignore the question just because it’s had to answer.

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