Climb

(A repost from March 2006)

Almost surely, like the old adage declares, smoke always goes up, climbing through the air that it grasp or to every spaces that it can take hold of (Of course, it goes down at some point; according to a song by that famous German rock group Scorpion). Therefore, man (human beings) tend to be like smoke for it seeks to climb towards higher realms, and this seems to be a natural trait that is hard to refute.

I was tending to my youngest child yesterday afternoon—-one year old daughter Evette Darwisa—-and it came to me as a kind of realization (a result of introspection) that toddlers are very enthusiastic climbers that whenever I put Evette on the floor, to walk by herself, she would always seem to find some chair, a table and or the stairway, and climb. I could not help surmise that perhaps, when we were little we must have also tended to reach out for higher platforms and climb as eagerly. My three older boys were also like Evette when they were little toddlers. I remember this because of the countless times that I have chased them towards the stairway and make some reprimand, warning them that they might fall. Evette is a fast-grower of some sort because at a very early toddler stage (one year and seven months) she is such a voracious climber, keener than all her older brothers, that she would even pull some chair to enable her to climb the dining table, using the chair as a stepping stone. This reminds me of course of that famous scientific test where it was once famously deduced that an ape has the intelligence of a small child. It was determined thru that experiment that an ape has that amount of aptitude as to process the need of a stepping board in order to climb a higher ground. I feel a little queasy here rationalizing my child’s climbing tenacity by being reminded of an ape. But it helps to point that out.

When I was a little child of about six or seven, just beyond the toddler age, I could remember that I did a lot of climbing myself. The cabinet of my Uncle Sammy is still heavily etched in my mind as I used to climb it like a spider or a lizard (it depends on how you see in your mind’s eye a gangly child struggling against a 12-foot furniture) along with the paperbooks that I have sighted there, the empty bottles of perfume, empty Gerber containers, that particular dusty artificial flower that had coiled wire for its stems, and even the color of the paint of the concerned cabinet—-glazy red on the outside (presumably varnished) and marine blue inside.

And often I climb a lot of trees when I was growing up, so many times in fact that in jest, I could say that if you convert the distance of area that I have covered climbing up trees and going down from them, into one horizontal line, it would have stretched nearly a thousand kilometers. I would have earned enough frequent miles that I could have visited Paris without having to pay for my airfare. But I think no airlines today give free miles for the distance one had climbed. Or maybe I should call some travel agency. I might get lucky you know.

Kidding aside. This personal theory of man as a natural climber—-especially as toddlers-may be a rumination of a certain reality that almost all of us already know about, like clearer than the sun in the sky. One may say, “Hey man, you’re writing about the obvious”. But you know, upon closer examination and assessment, many of us might not have seen the insinuations of nature and haven’t grasp the consequential principle of how man was build or made in the first place. Something in our nature propels us to seek higher level even without us consciously intending to, like an automatic instigator that says “climb my son” or “climb my daughter”, for you deserved to be up there. As we grow old, we worked our butts out so that we can have that much-awaited promotion or salary raise. This could for example be traced or compared to that toddler’s tendency to climb. We see the Joneses in our neighbors, and then there we are again trying to climb the social ladder, to have upward mobility as many among us dub it. In sports, we break bones and stretched our muscles because victory is a crest we desire and long for. In school, we burned the midnight candles so that someday we could be on that stage being applauded by many. Even as the writer carefully formulates his/her sentences and paragraphs so well, he deems that his work will climb the stage of popularity, if possible the bestseller list. And so as the singer who croons in the mellowest of tone, for he/she wants to be on this week’s radio Top 10 countdown. The carpenter wants to be foreman someday; the apprentice, a master; the prosecutor, a judge; the news reporter, an editor; the instructor, a professor; the cook, a chef; the prince, a king; the dreamer, a famous poet; the soldier, a general; the senator, a president of a nation; and so on and so forth. We climb. We always do. And the moment we stopped climbing is the time we never want ourselves to be in. Even as we grow old, we seek to question and see if there’d be another realm after old age, and possibly after life itself.

I have heard once before that there is this belief, probably a folk belief among our olds, which says babies were angels before. This might justify why toddlers always tend to climb chairs, tables, cabinets, stairways or anything that is high above the floor. Maybe they were so used to the “air up there” when they were angels that they kept on seeking higher ground. Of course, this is a ludicrous explanation for angels ain’t really believable in the sort of reality we are living in nowadays. A far more plausible scientific explanation may be somewhere out there. Science seems to have an explanation for just about everything.

I hope you could make sense about this rumination of mine, however confusing it may get—-man by nature is a climber.