What a 30 Foot Climbing Fall Taught Me About Gratitude

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Recently, as I neared the top of a difficult 35 foot (12 meter) climb at the local climbing gym in my newly adopted home of Vancouver, I made a dynamic move to reach the last hold. My right hand grabbed the small, awkwardly placed hold, but I couldn’t hang on, and my body fell away from the wall. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal: I was “on belay”, the rope secured to my harness, looped around a pulley at the top of the route and then down to a belay device on the harness of my partner on the floor below me. Falls like this happen all the time, a small drop until the rope catches you, and you rest in the air before getting back on the route to try the move again.

But not this time. This time, something went terribly wrong. I glanced down as I fell from the hold, and watched in horror as the rope raced through the harness and disappeared from view. I was free-falling from 30 feet, and there was nothing but the ground to stop my fall.

When I hit the rubber mat, the shock was intense, a violent impact that reverberated through my body. Thankfully, I landed in the same position I was in when my hand slipped from the hold: leaning up and to the right, so that I landed on my right side. Had I been upright, or in just about any other position, I would probably have broken my legs, and possibly my spine or neck vertebrae. My head didn’t hit the ground, so there was no concussion. I broke my right ankle pretty severely, and had three minor pelvic fractures, but the emergency medical technicians reassured me that I wasn’t paralyzed. That was my terror, the question I asked repeatedly once I realized I’d survived the fall.

A colleague of mine, an emergency physician, told me afterwards that 30 feet is the start of what they call the fatality zone. That’s the zone where they consider the possibility of death a significant risk. I didn’t die, and I wasn’t paralyzed. In fact, I was extraordinarily lucky.

Somehow, I’d tied a bad knot when I secured the rope to my harness, yet despite the height, I’d survived the fall surprisingly intact. I had surgery on my ankle, and I’m in a wheelchair and on crutches for a couple months, but I’m just a visitor to the world of disability. Five weeks after the fall, my pelvis is largely healed, and I can feel the ankle getting better by the day. I live and work in buildings with elevators, and the sidewalks are all wheelchair-friendly, so getting around isn't a problem. For all of that, I am deeply grateful. And that’s really what I want to write about in this post: the power of gratitude to help us through difficult times.

For most of my career, I’ve been working with people who’ve survived genocide, civil war, and displacement from their homes, communities, and homelands. Again and again, as I describe in my book War Torn, I’ve heard survivors of the most horrific violence and loss express gratitude for their survival, for the family members they didn’t lose, for the new chance they’ve gotten at building a life in exile. I’ve always been mystified by their capacity to focus on the good in the face of so much tragedy, to hold onto gratitude when it would be so easy to get locked into feelings of despair, fear, hopelessness, and rage.

I recall a Bosnian woman whose parents and brother had died when nationalist Bosnian Serbs set fire to their home. As she sat in my office, grief-stricken and haunted by the images of the burning house, she kept thanking God that she and her children had survived, that they had escaped to Croatia and eventually found a new home in Chicago. Her words weren’t spoken lightly; on the contrary, she genuinely felt gratitude despite the lasting emotional pain of her losses and the distressing memories of what she had witnessed. In fact, I believe her gratitude was a sort of psychological lifeline, a way of focusing on what she still had, rather than getting lost in despair at what she had lost. I’ve seen this sort of positive focus, this appreciation of whatever good one can still find, everywhere I’ve worked, every war zone and refugee community.

There’s also great pain in these places, of course, the legacy of war’s destructive power. But in the midst of that pain, and perhaps as a sort of balm to soothe it, is the power of gratitude to shift the focus away from what has been lost, to what remains, what is still possible, the seeds of hope.

Read the full available article on Psychology Today

Reflection: Have you ever had a near death or a close death experience make you cherish gratitude more?

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