> “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going…” - Thomas Merton

A few weeks ago I took up bouldering – a chaotic game of critical thinking disguised as a fun exercise. Not something I thought I'd love, but I'll tell you what, it's fun as hell. Before that, I had sat down and watched Conclave, an amazing thriller about conflict within the Catholic Church. That deserves its own post, really, but there's a particular part of the film that resonated with me such that (with me being an atheist) I had almost converted to Catholicism on the damn spot. It was the speech Ralph Fiennes' character gives when the cardinals meet after the death of the Pope. It reads:

My brothers and sisters [...] let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. 'Eli Eli, lama sabachtani?' He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

Beautiful prose. But the point of this speech is that certainty is (at least in some cases) a killer. We are certain of too many things: that our interpretation of scripture is the correct one, that because something is tradition, it should be so. We see lawmakers certain that 12-year-old victims of sexual abuse should carry their pregnancies to term, certain that the risk of harm to that child does not outweigh the potentiality of future persons. Dogma masquerading as truth. Certainty weaponised.

Not only is certainty a killer of unity or tolerance, but of progress itself. That seems somewhat counterintuitive; let me explain. When I began rock climbing, I believed—no, was certain—that I could conquer the entire damn gym because of my height. I'm quite tall, and so I have quite a far reach. You can already see where the delusion sets in. When I began, I thought "I have long limbs, this'll be easy". I had certainty that this was the case for bouldering as a whole. For the beginner climbs, sure, I could brute-force my way through. But the browns? Humbled the hell out of me. Many more factors came into play: you had to crimp some holds the size of literal bottle caps, you have to leap to others, and for some movements my lanky frame cramped into tight, awkward angles just so I wouldn't fall. Very fast, certainty became liability: "I am tall... I should be dusting this..." But raw, humbling doubt forced me to adapt. I had to put my faith in the beta, not my ego. Doubt does not equal indecision. It is the humility to realise you may be wrong, and as such you adapt. It is a faith in the process: that if I keep refining my climbs, I can make it. To acknowledge my limitations is a form of doubting; it's all that's needed, and as such, faith in the beta allows me to adapt how I climb to reach the top. Humility at the beginning would have allowed me to properly analyse the correct path to take, rather than looking to brute-force my way up, which would be detrimental to my later climbs.

Certainty isn't always that I can do it, though, but the opposite. It's that I can't. When my body's aching from holding onto a rock for a while, or I'm so high up that I'm scared to fall, my mind tells me that I'm not able to. I'm certain I can't. It happens – in some scenarios you just can't help but doubt yourself. "Can I make this jump?", "I'm losing strength, I'm going to fall!" From here I'll typically jump off. Defeated. But this is precisely where faith comes in. To believe that despite the odds, you will push through. That you believe you can make that jump. That, despite the loss of strength or the fear of falling, you can complete that climb. It is a leap of faith, as Kierkegaard put it (pun 10,000% intended). Faith here is about trusting the process. Trusting that you can make it. Trusting that even if you do fall and fail, the lessons you learn will allow you to make the next climb. It's a commitment despite doubt. That even though you cling onto a hold and you get that burning sensation, with your brain telling you "THAT'S ENOUGH!", you push past that and complete that damn climb. You dyno anyway. You have faith in the beta that's been refined through failure, even if it looks impossible. That's faith – it dances with doubt. Whether you are religious or not, faith is a core element to perseverance. I think bouldering reinforced that idea.

The cardinal was right: certainty can truly be detrimental, and to some, even a sin. Not necessarily of arrogance, but one that stagnates us. To stagnate on the wall means to fail (the number of times this has happened is unreal). In life, to stagnate is to crystalise and revolve around fundamentalist thinking. I urge you to keep doubting. Keep falling. Keep refining your beta. The only thing worse than falling is refusing to climb (unless you free solo, then you really don't want to fall).