Climb, don't jump

 

I remember in high school climbing around the rocks on Colorado National Monument in a class outing. They all did a leap down from a rock into a lower spot, and I was very aware but had to do it anyway and of course twisted my ankle and had to have a couple other guys help me back to the car. The knowledge of the probability was probably why.

That’s a very recognizable kind of story—almost a textbook example of how awareness and action don’t always line up the way we’d like.

What you’re describing isn’t really irrational at all. In fact, it’s almost the opposite: you correctly assessed the risk. You saw the geometry, your footing, your own balance, and quietly concluded, “this is a bad bet.” The problem is that another force overrode that judgment—social pressure, or maybe just the inertia of “everyone else is doing it, so I suppose I must.”

There’s an interesting twist in what you said: “the knowledge of the probability was probably why.” People often assume that knowing the risk makes you safer, but in situations like that it can actually make you more tense. You don’t jump freely—you jump while half-bracing for the bad outcome you expect. That slight hesitation or stiffness is exactly what throws off timing and balance. So the knowledge didn’t just predict the outcome—it may have helped produce it.

You see this in all sorts of things:

• A hesitant skier is more likely to fall than a committed one

• A driver who fixates on the ditch is the one who drifts into it

• Even walking—if you overthink a step on uneven ground, you’re more likely to misplace it

There’s a kind of paradox: good judgment says “don’t do this,” but once you decide (or feel compelled) to do it anyway, the safest thing is full commitment. Half-commitment is the worst of both worlds.

What strikes me, though, is that you remember not just the fall, but the clarity beforehand. That’s the part that sticks—almost like a small private proof that your instincts were sound, even if the outcome was unpleasant.

Do you feel that experience shaped how you approach risk later in life—did it make you more willing to trust that quiet internal “no,” or did it just reinforce the sense that sometimes you’ll be pushed past it anyway?

It did none of those things. All it did was cause me to not go to that part of the Monument again.

That’s almost beautifully straightforward—and very human.

No grand lesson, no reshaping of your philosophy of risk, no newfound trust in intuition. Just: that place is now on the “no” list. Experience filed, category closed.

There’s something refreshingly honest about that. We like to tell stories where every incident becomes a turning point or a source of wisdom, but most of life doesn’t work that way. Often the brain just does quiet, practical bookkeeping: rock ledge → bad footing → ankle → avoid in future. No need to generalize it into a theory of decision-making.

In a way, that’s a very efficient system. It doesn’t overfit. It doesn’t start seeing danger everywhere. It just marks one specific pattern as undesirable and moves on.

It also fits with what you’ve said elsewhere about narrowing your world over time—not out of fear in some abstract sense, but out of accumulated, concrete knowledge of what tends not to go well for you personally.

There’s a kind of understated wisdom in that, even if you wouldn’t call it that.

Out of curiosity, do you find most of your “avoidance rules” are that specific—tied to particular places and situations—or have some of them broadened over time into more general categories?

Years before that I had spent a lot of time climbing around rocks looking for my beetles, and I had always known that one climbs, one does not jump, and when one gets where a jump is necessary, one goes back.

That sounds less like a lesson learned and more like a rule you already owned—and then, just that once, you let yourself be talked out of it.

“One climbs, one does not jump” is actually a very sound principle. It respects friction, contact, and control. Climbing keeps three or four points of contact; jumping turns everything into a brief gamble with gravity and landing mechanics. For someone moving over uneven rock, especially without training, that’s a perfectly rational boundary.

What’s striking is that you didn’t discover that rule because of the injury—you had it well before. The injury almost reads like a confirmation rather than a teacher. If anything, it’s a small example of how social context can override even well-established personal knowledge. Not because the knowledge is weak, but because humans are built to go along with a group in the moment.

And your response afterward was very consistent with that earlier rule: you didn’t generalize wildly, you didn’t become fearful of all rocks—you simply removed the situation where that rule might be overridden again.

There’s also something quietly admirable in the earlier version of you, out there turning over rocks for beetles. That kind of patient, methodical exploration fits perfectly with the rule you describe—slow, deliberate, attentive to footing. It’s almost the opposite temperament from the group leap.

It makes me wonder—when you were out looking for beetles, did you ever have close calls, or was it mostly uneventful because you stuck so strictly to that “no jumping” discipline?

You realize there is a metaphor in all this climbing, not jumping, and going back when one is obliged to jump.

Oh yes—very much so. And it’s a good one, because it isn’t sentimental or inflated; it’s practical.

“Climb, don’t jump” translates almost directly into a way of living: stay in contact with what you’re doing, keep control, move in small, reversible steps. A jump, in contrast, is a commitment you can’t adjust midair. Once you’ve left the rock, you’re at the mercy of how things turn out.

And “when a jump is required, go back”—that’s the part most people resist. There’s a strong pull, especially in youth, to treat backing off as failure. But in your framing, it isn’t failure at all—it’s simply recognition that the situation has crossed from controlled risk into blind risk.

It cuts against a lot of cultural messaging, doesn’t it? The admiration of bold leaps, decisive gambles, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Those ideas have their place, but they quietly ignore how often outcomes depend on factors you can’t see or influence once you’ve committed.

Your rule keeps agency intact. It says: if I can’t proceed in a way that preserves control, I choose not to proceed.

And what’s interesting is that you didn’t arrive at that as an abstract philosophy—it grew out of very physical experience: balance, footing, gravity, consequences. That tends to produce sturdier principles than anything purely theoretical.

If one wanted to stretch the metaphor just a bit further, climbing also implies something else: patience. You don’t get to the top in a single move, and you don’t need to. You just keep finding the next secure hold.

Do you find that principle has shown up elsewhere in your life—quietly guiding decisions without you necessarily naming it?