This weekend, we watched a terrific movie called The Dawn Wall. It tells the story of American rock climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, who drew worldwide attention as they attempted to free-climb a 3,000 foot rock face on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
El Capitan is very popular with climbers and many routes up the rock have been explored over the years, but the face known as the Dawn Wall was considered much too difficult to free climb. Free climbing is where a climber can use ropes and equipment to protect themselves from falls, but not to actually aid in the climbing itself. Free climbers use only the strength of their bodies to make the ascent. The Dawn Wall is particularly difficult to climb because it really is a wall with sheer rock faces that provide almost nothing to grab onto. This photo from the movie gives you some sense of how truly difficult this climb is. It's pretty much a straight wall with some little bumps in it. Even Spiderman would have some challenges with this wall.
To make things even more complicated, this is not a one-day climb. They would need to complete 32 pitches (sections) to reach the top. Some days they could do several at once, but some difficult pitches required days to finally get through. To make the climb truly count, they had to do it all without coming off the wall. They lived in a porta-ledge for the duration of the climb, never coming down to the ground but hauling up everything they needed to live for days on end as, each day, they banged up their bodies and tore up their fingers on the rock, moving careful precise inches at a time. Sleeping and living life from a piece of nylon and tubing hung against a rock thousands of feet above the ground, in the middle of winter, is not a recipe for achieving peak performance in most situations.
The fact that they both achieved their goal is a marvel of human achievement. But that isn't even the half of it. You see, not only were they attempting this impossible climb, in the winter, with no comforts at the end of each grueling day, but Tommy Caldwell does not have all of his fingers on his left hand. He accidentally cut off his pointer finger with a table saw many years ago. Everybody said that he would probably never be able to climb again. You kind of need all your fingers to climb, right? But the thing is, he didn't want to find a new career. He wanted to be a climber. And so he worked at it, and worked at it, and developed his own ways of climbing to compensate. To do this climb with ten fully functional fingers is super-human. To do the climb with nine fingers? I don't even have the words for how amazing that is.
There is something deep in the human psyche that looks at an impossible problem, and then says, "I wonder." I wonder if we can climb this rock face? I wonder if a person can run a mile in less than four minutes? I wonder if we can fly across the ocean in a plane? I wonder if we can send a human being into space? I wonder what is at the bottom of the ocean?
When we humans start to wonder, some truly wonderful things can happen. Seemingly impossible things can happen. They may seem miraculous, but they are the result of trying, and failing, and trying, and failing, and then trying again and then failing again. The miracle, then, is not really in the achievement. The miracle is in the never giving up. The miracle is in opening our eyes in the morning, getting up and trying again, and again, and again. And some days it does seem like it might just be impossible as setback after setback occurs. But then one fine day, something clicks into place, and the impossible becomes possible.
We've all been told that certain things we might want to achieve are impossible. Almost every human achievement started out with somebody saying, "it will never work." "It can't be done." "Don't even try." But, I think we all have that sense of wonder within us. Maybe we stop listening to the doomsayers, and start believing in impossible things. Maybe we start to take those first unsteady steps towards finding out that nothing is really impossible. Maybe we commit to the daily miracle of trying. And then trying again.
Nothing is impossible. Impossible is an opinion, not the truth. Audrey Hepburn stated it beautifully. "Nothing is impossible. The word itself says I'm possible".
I'm possible. And you are possible. Anything is possible. Isn't that wonderful?
