Climbing and Falling

Not all decisions are made once.  There are some decisions that you have to make over and over again, whether it be leading up to a momentous action or continuing an arduous journey.

Once you start climbing a mountain, the rest of the journey consists of countless steps.  Although each step certainly depends on the ones before it, the first by no means causes the last.

Falling is different.  The false move start leads to the cataclysmic crash end.  There is no recourse.  There is one single event that decrees the downwards path.  Bad falls cause injuries that insinuate vulnerability.

When one falls far enough, they may feel as if they have lost all of the progress they made up to where they were before.  It can be difficult to bear the vanity of all the wasted aspirations, and sometimes the fall hurts so much that it's hard to consider resuming the climb, and the energy necessary to get back up is difficult to make resurface.

Haste and zeal both augment the chance of another misstep.  And because it is so empirically difficult to measure retrospectively one's pretension, getting back on your feet can be disorientating; if one cannot determine the cause of their blunder, then do they try again the path they were traveling, or do they foray into another, perhaps safer, route to their imagined summit?


There needs to be a driving force.  It takes something positive - a perceptible hope - to persuade a person to continue making the decision to climb upwards.  No bitter remnant of failure or past dissatisfaction will suffice, because all such stresses are naturally assuaged by increasing one's distance from the immediate danger.  Reaching for the pinnacle of some lofty goal may help a person to leave behind misfortune, but escaping from misfortune will not sustainably lead one towards that peak.