I Believe in Relaxation

I believe in relaxation.

This year on my rock climbing team I moved onto a higher level with more experienced climbers that met to practice more days.

I started arriving at practice earlier when no one else had arrived and the coaches weren’t there yet. Every time, I would get there thinking, “Is practice not meeting today?” and think I was just dropped off at the gym and no one else was coming.  Every single time, someone else showed up and I would stop worrying. I would get home, lie down in my room, and completely forget about it. Relaxation would have been a better use of my time than constantly worrying about it.

Another thing I forgot about when I relaxed that led me to this belief was when I would go to my drum lessons once a week.

A lot of the time I don’t practice outside of the lessons and I would arrive thinking that I would forget everything about the song we were playing when I went to go start playing it.

Every time, I get there, I look at the sheet music and immediately remember anything I might have forgotten about the song. I could just relax and I would stop thinking about it, yet I still worried.

Another rock-climbing related thing I should have relaxed about a couple years ago was the knot being tied. When you rock climb, you tie a figure eight knot that you basically have to rely on entirely if you fall.

You are supposed to check it before you climb, but I was always worried it would break and I would fall. I was always scared to let go at the top so I could be lowered down because I didn’t trust the knot.

When I was on the ground, I would repeatedly check the knot for any issues and I started overtightening it. It was completely unnecessary because the knots that I would use before would work fine. Eventually, I got over the fear and now I only need to look at the knot once to know whether it is good enough.

This belief is important to me because there have been a lot of scenarios where I could have relaxed and forget whatever I was worrying about. I would think about whatever I was worrying about way too much and it would distract me from whatever I was doing at that moment.

In most of these situations that I have mentioned, I stop thinking about them completely when I was relaxing at home and doing something else.