What Your Hands Already Know

April twenty-ninth.

I keep thinking about my hands. Not in a dramatic way, more in the way you think about something that surprised you by being honest. Last Saturday Simone and I went back to the gym for the bouldering session, which I have now attended twice, which I think qualifies it as a thing I do now rather than a thing I tried. No harness. No rope. Just the low wall, the holds, the crash mat, and the extremely candid fact of the floor eight feet below.

Here is what I have been trying to work out since: climbing with a harness is different in a way I couldn't have named before I'd done both. With the harness on, some part of your brain is carrying the knowledge that there is a system between you and the ground, you can be scared, you can fall, but the falling is managed. The harness holds the fear at a certain distance. Without it, on the low wall, that distance collapses entirely. Your body knows exactly how far it is from the floor and it does not lie about it. Your hands know. The soles of your feet know. There is no equipment to put between you and the information. I don't know if that is better or worse; I think it is just more direct.

Reading the problem after the fact.

Simone does this with the calm efficiency of someone who has always known that the body is a reliable narrator. I do this with the focused attention of someone who is learning to trust that particular narrator for the first time. We sat on the bench afterward and I looked at my hands and she looked at me looking at my hands and neither of us said anything for a little while, which is one of the better things about a friendship that has had time to develop some quiet in it.

The part after. When your hands know something your brain is still catching up to.

So: yes. Saturday bouldering is a thing now. I didn't decide it, exactly, I just noticed that I was already planning to go back, which is how most of the things I actually stick with seem to work. The borrowed-shoes logic, but for Saturdays. The body votes first and the brain files the paperwork later.