Why One Climbs
By <Witheld>
Jan. 10th, 2007
It was only halfway through the day when my breathing became hard and labored. I stopped at a rest-point, brushing frost off a bench and sitting down. The silence startled me. The rhythmic sound of my spiked boots digging into the mountainside had gone all through the day. They had quickly become a part of me. Now they were gone. I brushed the frost off a bench and sat down, troubled. Others climbed past me, jeering as they did. I berated myself silently. Stopping progress for a rest! But, I had stopped, so I decided to rest. I noticed an old man sitting on the bench beside me. There was frost clinging to his beard, his eyelashes, and all over the rest of his person. His hair was covered by a tight fitting cap. His eyes, though, were the most noticeable. They were not looking at anything. They were faded and distant. He appeared to have been here for a long time. Why, though? Who would stop their progress to stop and just... think? I moved to the edge of my bench. “What are you doing here?” I asked. The man simply shrugged, as if deep in thought. I asked again. “Why are you not making progress?” The man’s eyes sparked with life, and he turned towards me. “Why aren’t you?” he asked. I merely shrugged. “I’m just resting. But you look like you’ve been here for long time.” “Yes.” He said. “I have.” What a fool! To be here just because he wants to, not making progress! He looked at me again. “Why do you climb the mountain?” I replied without thinking. “To make progress.” The old man sighed. “Forget it. You are as useless as everyone who has come here. Everyone does too, eventually.” I asked him what he meant. He did not respond. I studied him again. His hands were knobby, with bumpy veins running along it. His cheeks were wrinkled and sagging, at least what I could see of it behind the beard. Perhaps he had stopped making progress because he was old. But that couldn’t be true. We all kept making progress untill we died. If we stopped making progress because we were some how incapacitated, then we spent the rest of our life in leisure. Thinking about that made me shudder. Sitting in an armchair, reading a good book by the fire. Relaxing, for heaven’s sake! I asked him again. “Why aren’t you making progress?” His eyes seemed far away. I was interested, despite myself. The brightness returned to his eyes once again. “Do you climb because you enjoy it?” I thought about this. “No. I climb to make progress. The more progress we make, the higher the community places us.” The old man seemed to be lost in one of his thought-periods. When he emerged, he asked, “What community?” I was startled. “The community that is past the lodge for the incapacitated, of course.” “Have you been there?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know it exists?” He asked. I replied, “There has to be a community back there. Everyone talks about it.”
“But has anyone been there?”
“No”
This conversation troubled me. There was no community? Of course there was! I had never known life without a community. I had not been there, of course. Nobody I knew had. But people talked about it, when they had time to talk. “The community is a sign of comfort.” I said. “When we go back there, I will be rewarded for all the progress I have made.”
“And when will you go back there?”
I was at a loss for words. I did not know when. “I will go back” I said. The old man looked me in the eyes once again. “There is no community. You have realized that now, although you knew it all along.”
“You do not enjoy climbing.” He said. “But then what do you do when you get to the top?”
“The top?”
“Yes. The top. When it all ends, and you finish progressing.” I could not grasp such a concept. The end? “I do not stop progressing” I replied. “Then what” the man asked. “Are you progressing towards?”
“I am simply progressing because I must”
“Nothing is forcing you to. If you do not enjoy it, and you do not bbenifit from it, you can stop.”
“I see...” I said. I quickly checked my watch. My God! We had been conversing for half an hour!
“No, you do not see. You simply want to get away from me, because my revealing of your world is frightening you. You simply want to leave, and go back to your useless ‘progressing’” he replied. This shocked me. “My progressing is not useless!” I said, with little conviction. Finally, I’d had enough. This man was mad. “Good day to you” I said. Then I left. The rhythmic chinking of my boots digging into the ice set my mind in motion again. I didn’t look back. Something inside me, however, told me that if I had, the old man would have been gone. As I progressed, the man’s question came back to me. Why do you climb? I still do not know the answer.
Wrote it myself.
It only took me a few hours to write.