Writing is bouldering, bouldering is writing
Dear readers! I’m very sorry to announce this week that I have become one of those people who “boulders”—and, even worse, that I am now going to subject you to some comparisons between said activity and the art of writing. I can’t resist! The parallels are simply overpowering, and, furthermore, I already started and abandoned three different versions of today’s newsletter and finally had to resort to this last-minute overcaffeinated riff. So: Picture me midway up a fifteen-foot-tall indoor wall, clinging to a pair of colorful plastic blobs, one foot jammed painfully against a plastic nubbin the size of a coin purse while the other flops around in search of a second toehold, and you will have a pretty good idea of my facility at this new hobby and also my feeling state at my desk most mornings. Bouldering and writing: They are all reaching, grasping, straining, scooting, slipping, and falling—and falling and falling and falling—with the very occasional bliss of a completed ascent, after
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