Climb a Mountain

“Hey, Jordan, over here!” Jordan’s best friend, Mahir, waved his hand, pointing to a fissure in the side of the cliff. “We could climb this!”

Jordan clipped his harness on and checked his rope and carabiners. He weighed one of them in his hand, calculating. Then he eyeballed potential placement locations, considering the difficulty of the task. “That crack is unbelievably small. I don’t think we’d get up very high.”

“At the time of a test, a person rises or falls,” said Ghanim, Mahir’s dad. Shaking his head in confusion over the foreign proverb, Jordan examined the crack. It was nothing more than a sliver in the solid face of the cliff. He shifted in his harness as Mahir gave the proverb his own interpretation: “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying hard enough.” Jordan recognized the bit of advice from a previous climbing lesson.

His own father’s voice echoed in his thoughts, as if in a half-forgotten dream. “Climb a mountain, son, and you climb the insecurity in your own life. You climb over your shadow, climb over your doubt.” That was five years ago, before the automobile accident that took his dad’s life. Jordan couldn’t help replaying the story in his mind, how the other driver had veered out of control around a corner. Jordan’s dad swerved across the lane of oncoming traffic, effectively blocking the other car from a cliff. But his father’s car careened over the edge. The sudden move had saved the lives of three people in that car.

Jordan’s dad had never hesitated. And now Jordan wouldn’t either. Concentrating on his balance, he took a deep breath and began to climb.