If You're Mad Then Punch Something

(Contributed by Mitch Greene)
 
Have you ever felt so much emotion at one moment that you immediately reacted?

At my local rock-climbing gym there is a specific wall that is hooked up to an app. This wall has thousands of exact duplicates in rock-climbing gyms all over the world. When you sign up on the app and start finishing climbs, you’ll get a world ranking. There are hundreds of problems to climb and the more you climb, the better your ranking becomes. Pretty cool, right?

A while back I was working this wall. I was getting really close to finishing a climb, but I was running out of time before I had to leave. I am a pretty competitive guy and “good enough” is just plain old failure to me. It can sometimes be a problem as I occasionally may resort to punching walls to get the emotion out when I might not win – particularly against myself

While I was working on this wall, I fell one too many times. That extreme feeling of self-anger hit me, and I turned around and punched the wall to my right. See, the thing about the wall to my right is that I hadn’t punched it before. While the wood I was punching was smooth and didn’t hurt too badly, the wall to my right wasn’t the same. This wall was for climbing. This meant that the wall was NOT smooth and very sharp. Yeah…ouch. As soon I pulled my hand away, the blood started flowing. I cut up my hand so badly that it looked like I stuck my fist in a blender.

A lot of people say that releasing your emotions is a good thing and good for you, and I would not deny that. However, keeping your composure while feeling strong emotions does not make you an imposter. It’s not faking it, but rather controlling it. It’s calm under pressure. It’s Captain Sullenberger experiencing a bird strike and emergency landing on the Hudson with no time for an effective option through Air Traffic Control. And no one was hurt.

Feeling your emotions is important… how you act on them is another story.