I wish I'd always have an answer.
On Sunday, for the second time this semester, I made the sojourn west to Farley Ledges. The changing of seasons was unmistakable. Winds plucked gilded leaves off hanging branches, and on opposing hills the slopes were specked with blobs of jasmine and mauve and crimson, like some pointillist's vision of fall.
I've always been enamoured of the road. On the way back, Cypress was driving with Fleetwood Mac in the background. I watched the sun set and guardrails flash by. For an instant I was eleven again, in the backseat behind my parents on the road from Anchorage to Valdez. It was a cosy kind of ignorance. I had no idea what the map looked like or where we were going to stop, so the only thing I could do was to relax and take everything in. That feeling has always clung to me. When you stumble into a landscape without any answers, the unfurling of beauty is pure magic.
I've always chased that magic. Then inevitably, when someone has searched for magic long enough, they no longer remain blindfolded to its answers.
Sunday's Farley trip was the first one I've led: teaching lead belaying, lead climbing, fixing anchors, cleaning — all the usual stuff, including the eternally problematic stickclip.[1] But there's a whole host of things I've never noticed until I'm running a trip: estimating how many draws to bring, finding good warmup areas in the guidebook, keeping people entertained on rock. Then there are the technical details I've relegated to intuition, which now must be expressed in painfully symbolic terms. Knot-tying, clipping in, the direction of anchors, through the bolts or through the rings.
It's easy to be highly opinionated, even easier to be quiet, but just so hard to be right. This chain of thought is obvious but really struck me lately. Before Jude and I secured funding from investors, we held highly opinionated views on research, markets, and our business model. Now that we had backing, sounding convincing wasn't a priority anymore; we faced the grim task of convincing ourselves. Not the flimsy kind of convincing, but a rigorous, almost proof-like insistence that to the best of our knowledge, there are no flaws in our assumptions, no contradictions in our arguments.[2] It only takes a point to make a point, but it takes many to find the true one. And sometimes there's no room for error.
I almost always have an opinion, but I'm only heavily opinionated on a very small set of things, where I've spent enough time to be confident in my intuition: research, hiking / some degree of outdoor climbing, books, etc. I used to think that these were plenty, but this semester has demanded more answers than I could give. It's not easy even to give myself a frank answer; it's so much harder when you're giving answers to other people. Running trips, training for objectives, bootstrapping an idea, pushing a research vision. Or being honest about my feelings.
A big part of it, as Jelly would say, is being clear and confident. And that's something I've always strived for but thought I'd have more time to figure out. This semester flipped that on its head. Providing answers is highly susceptible to scope-creeping. Doing things well eventually leads to partnership, and then suddenly you feel a need to be well-defined on every front. And in order to do that responsibly and reliably, there is no substitute for exhausting information to the best of your knowledge.
Inevitably, the same impulse that drew me to pursue what's magical is now driving me to create it. It's only logical; it's what I've always longed for. I cannot treat answers differently and only open my eyes to some of them. I may not always have the answers but I must keep looking. It is my turn to unfurl the land.
[1] My preferred method of using a stickclip is not to use it. Always solo to the first bolt.
[2] Visualising a startup feels like cleaning an anchor. You'd better do it right, because only you can stop yourself from falling.