Chapter One: A Synchronous Kind of Love

I find myself feeling guilty when I have a block of time off of work and I don't spend it climbing, but Brooklyn isn't too bad of a place to spend rest days, I’ve recently decided. I’ve roughly calculated one hundred and seventy days of rock climbing a year at this point in my life, which is nothing to sneeze at! (And then there's that little nagging voice in my brain that keeps telling me I could get out more if I REALLY tried.)

I live on this really pretty, quiet block in Crown Heights. This is my fifth time moving apartments since I moved to Brooklyn in 2010. I fell in love with my neighborhood pretty quickly: the diversity is refreshing, the energy of the city is unparalleled to any other city—and don't even get me started on the food. I enjoy taking the subway, but I often bike to work, delighting in people-watching as I whiz by, pumping tunes (usually DMX if I’m being honest) during the short nine blocks to my job.

This particular weekend, I opted out of a six a.m. start for my usual climbing weekend and woke up at my leisure, instead. One French press of coffee later, I walked to the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market with my compost scraps that I'd been selectively freezing. I passed by The Soldiers and Sailors Arch that reminds me so much of The Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. And then, I thought about how you can miss so much when you put your head down, but when you live in a busy city, you find yourself doing this a majority of the time. When I’m in a rush to get somewhere, which is often, my eyes travel to my shuffling feet on the sidewalk—one foot following another. It’s meditative and I'm positive that I can get to where I’m heading much faster this way.

I think that a small part of me used to worry that living in New York City defined me in some way, as if it took away from who I was becoming—as a climber. And if I wasn’t too careful, either aspects of my life could entirely take over my identity, but I’m strangely learning to embrace both. You can be a climber who lives in a city. It’s a synchronous kind of love.

Someone once told me, "You can't hold climbing too close to you—it becomes like anything else in this life. If you hold it too close, you can't see it for what it really is and truly love and appreciate it for the same."