When I was in college, I showed up one day out of the blue at a friend’s dorm and convinced him that instead of studying for a mid-term, what he really needed to do was join me in clambering up a rock face that formed the peak of a local mountain.  

We didn’t have any ropes or special equipment like pitons—and even if we’d had them, we wouldn’t have known what to do with them.  We were just typical young men with outsized appetites for risk taking, paired with not yet fully-formed faculties of judgment.

I had clambered up some smaller (much, much smaller!) rock formations in upstate New York, as a kid who apparently hadn’t gotten the chance to play on as many monkey bars as he would have liked.  I was also the one who had proposed the current climb, so when we arrived at the site, I felt it was my role to lead it.

Up I went.  The lower portions of the rock face weren’t sharply vertical, and there were lots of possible approaches up them.  As I went farther up, though, I found fewer of these, and the angles got steeper.  A distinct element of fear crept into the experience—but overcoming it was part of what made the challenge worthwhile.

Eventually I found myself in a spot where there didn’t seem to be any reasonable way of advancing further.  My friend and I were both substantially above the treetops by this point—high enough up that a fall would likely have resulted in crippling injuries, even death.  To make matters worse, the rock face was too steep for us to have any hope of successfully climbing back down.

Just above me was a ledge that I could use my arms to boost myself up onto—but above it jutted another rock formation that I could all too easily bash my head on.  If this didn’t outright knock me out, it could still send me plummeting to the rocks far below.

At this point, the fear ceased to be in any way entertaining.  I started to tremble—making the successful execution of a difficult move even more unlikely.  Not knowing what to do, I was becoming desperate.

At this point a calm, steady thought entered my mind:

Panicking won’t get you anywhere. Move as confidently and firmly…but carefully… as you can.
 
I swallowed hard and mentally mapped out my next moves.  I’d push myself up more slowly and carefully than I usually would—but not so slowly that I’d find myself unable to get all the way up, and risk a dangerously unsteady return to the current ledge.

I took a deep breath—and made it successfully onto the ledge above me. From there, I was able to move sideways to a place where I could angle my way over the top of the jutting ledge, sit down, and explain to my friend below me how to get past the forbidding obstacle.

From there, we had no trouble making our way up to the mountain’s peak.
 
I’ll never forget the moment when I pulled myself over a rock, and found nothing above it but blue sky.  We found a good place to sit, and gazed out in wonderment over a long green valley where hawks circled far below us.