Climb

I just learned that on August 3, 2016, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) formally announced that sport climbing would be a medal sport in the 2020 Summer Olympics. The inclusion was proposed by the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) in 2015. What got my attention was a video clip of one of the three combined disciplines—lead climbing, bouldering, and speed climbing, the video showed the speed climbing event.

The video caused a big smile on my face. It made me think of Lauren and the many happy days we as a family enjoyed watching her climb. I guess it was a combination  of her petite size balanced with just enough strength to enable her to climb walls, or towers almost effortlessly very, very quickly. I was instantly back in Disney World watching Lauren scaling a very high rock tower at the park for the first time in her life. When we came upon it she wanted to climb it instantly. She did so many times while we all watched. As she was climbing, a small group of teenage boys gathered and were having fun competing against each other. One young man was much better than the others. In spite of Lala being much younger Lauren and the young man had slipped into an ad hoc climbing match. The young man soon found out he was no match for LaLa. She did the same thing at a Christian Youth Camp Lauren and her brother Evan went to. Even the most athletic of the young men could not match Laurens’s speed and agility in scaling the walls. I think she found a great sense of joy in that, LOL!

I could not help but wonder how good Lauren would have been at that sport, and more importantly how much that might have helped her in overcoming, or never getting caught up in addiction. I think it would have been something she would have been good at and really enjoyed. Something that perhaps would have given her a little more sense of purpose and value. One of the biggest places Lauren felt that was in her work, working fostered value for her. She felt she was a contributor. This post talks about how we may have handled that better: “The Best Thing I Ever Did for My Daughter”.

In his book, Lost Connections, author Johann Hari tells the story of an innovative and impactful program called The Bromley-by-Bow Center located in a concrete crevice of East London. Early in his life, Sam Everington had an event happen that made him vow to do something meaningful with his life. That desire found fruition in the work being done at the Bromley-by-Bow Center. You can read more about what happened in Hari’s book “Lost Connections” on page 190. The book explains how this longing began to form: “Sam thought of that moment when, as a young doctor in East London, he felt uncomfortable because he kept noticing something that he wasn’t meant to notice. Many patients came to him with depression and anxiety, and he had been told by his training how to respond. “When we went to medical school,” he explains, “everything was biomedical, so what you described as depression was [due to] neurotransmitters—it was a chemical imbalance.” The solution, then, was drugging. But that didn’t seem to match the reality of what

he was seeing. If Sam sat and talked with his patients and really listened, the initial problem—the idea of something going wrong inside their brains—“very rarely ended up being the real issue that mattered to them.” There was almost always something deeper, and they would talk about it if he asked them.”   The book goes on to say “He believed that something was going wrong for his depressed patients not primarily in their brains or their bodies, but in their lives, and if he wanted to help make them better, he had to help his patients change their lives. What they needed was to reconnect.”

One day a gal named Lisa showed up at the center to discover when you went to see your doctor, you didn’t just get pills. You were also prescribed one of over a hundred different ways to reconnect—with the people around you, with the society, and with values that really matter. Lisa got assigned to one of Sam’s programs tasked with the purpose of creating a garden in an inner-city area called “Dog Crap Ally”. Lisa and twenty other volunteers were tasked with making “Dog Crap Alley” beautiful!

On that first day, Lisa looked at the scrubland and looked at the other volunteers, and the thought that they were responsible for this made her seize up with anxiety. How, in two days a week, were they going to make anything work? Her heart began to thump. The group eventually agreed on a common goal to make this park nice for people to walk through.

Over many weeks the group went through the process of doing and learning what needed to happen to turn this wasteland into a beautiful garden, and they did. People started to walk through the park, and they would thank the group—who had been shut away, feeling useless, for so long—for what they were doing. Eventually, the people in the group began to feel, in their modest ways, that they had a purpose—that they could do something. Lisa later said that the disconnection in her life was being healed. She eventually went on to open her own garden center in Wales.

I can not help but feel that if Lauren had found something like “Speed Climbing” she would have developed a greater sense of purpose and more importantly connection in her life. The post “Conversations” talks about ways LaLa tried to discover some of these things.

One of the things we can do to try to help a loved one fighting addiction or mental health is to help them see the places where purpose and connection can happen. Or if we are struggling with a mental health issue or addiction like Lisa, maybe we can take that first step toward connecction. Maybe it might help us to take that step with someone by our side!

This weeks featured image is by Brooke Shaden, it is called “A Little Bit of Faith, A Little Bit of Hope”