Satisfaction

Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. If you don’t have to give something up for what you are doing you will get no sweetness from it. Arthur Brooks.

Here’s a great short clip from the North Face on an adaptive climbing festival held in the Red River Gorge in Kentucky. The Red is known for long hard pump fests that challenge even very good climbers. This is climbing culture at it’s best: getting people together to pursue a mentally and physically demanding sport that rewards a committed try hard attitude. The sort of attitude that stands you in good stead for all of life’s challenges.

What is so brilliant about this festival is that differently abled people get to test their own limits and take real risks. In a world obsessed with safetyism, the ability to take risk is often only afforded to the healthy, but risk is essential to a healthy, productive and fulfilling life. Without struggle there is no joy, and we are all entitled to a little joy each day.

In a world of negative media, where there are people like this, whose entire purpose in life is to denigrate anyone who fails a false moral purity test, it’s redemptive to know there are a huge cadre of normal people out there trying, in some small way, to make someone else’s life a little bit better, if only for a weekend.