'Thou shouldst know thyself!'

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Weakness at the Rock Face

How do we define a weakness rather than simply a trait? Perhaps it is an aspect of ourselves we find lacking, either by the standards of social approval or by our own internal self-judgement. We should, of course, be aware of our weaknesses.

But who, really, wants to share them in public?

I tend to like the idea of doing something more than the doing itself.

This leads me way too often to start activities that I later deeply regret. 

To add to my problems I am poorly anchored in physical reality. I'm clumsy, inattentive to the world around me. I lack that instinctive ability of knowing what to touch, or how to take things apart and then put them back together again.

When it comes to manipulating physical reality, I am inept. 

My countervailing strengths lie in the conceptual: I was a competent programmer, a good theoretician in computer science and artificial intelligence, and a successful telecoms network architect.

But I can never repair anything - indeed, the very prospect fills me with terror.

When I was fourteen, my school, Bristol Grammar, started a rock-climbing club on the Avon Gorge. The gorge, with its sheer cliffs rising three or four hundred feet above the River Avon, sits almost in the heart of Bristol. The idea - the concept - of climbing those cliffs I found thrilling.

So, naturally, I signed up - pretty much over my mother’s dead body, as she was convinced I was going to die, although that thought had not yet occurred to me.

But with my father’s amused support, I forged ahead.

On Sunday mornings I would cycle the few miles from our home in Henbury, down the Portway, to the base of the cliffs. The club had a few older, competent climbers who led the routes, while we novices followed on the ropes. Until then, I had never confronted the reality of being a hundred feet up a vertical wall of rock with no obvious way forward and no clear way back.

At some point, I found myself exactly in that predicament. A tiny ledge, no safe hold, a feeling of about to topple, a vast, dizzying void beneath me, my knees vibrating involuntarily against the cliff. This is the subconscious already panicking; waiting for the conscious mind to catch up.

I realised I was not, and never would be, a natural rock climber.

I continued, my pride would not let me give up. My mother remained implacably opposed, convinced I would fall to my death. My father, observing my unease, quietly asked: did I really want to call it a day? Was I afraid that quitting would look like surrendering to my mother’s fears?

Reluctantly, I eventually had to admit he was right. It was pride alone that kept me turning up, the fear of losing face: I really didn't like it.

So we devised a face-saving excuse and I left the climbing club. 

And I have never gone rock climbing again.

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Other things I have started then given up over the decades: learning conversational french, learning piano, getting a maths MSc, properly studying physics topics like GR/QFT, learning to play the harmonica.