Читать книгу The Tree Climber’s Guide онлайн

6 страница из 11

As we get older and grow out of many childhood fears, we develop others. We no longer dread what lies beneath the bed, but those who once sprung off trampolines now fear anything higher than a stepladder. Mounting the kitchen sideboard or reaching to close a window we find ourselves suddenly dizzy, reeling at a sheer drop of three feet. In such instances vertigo is an irrational response. Just like the rabbit in the headlights, it serves no evolutionary purpose; fear is there to be subordinated to our willpower. The humanzee may overcometh.

The second obstacle, shame, is the harder to surmount. This is because it’s so deeply ingrained, a tragic part of our social conditioning. There seems to be a common perception that climbing trees is not at all respectable. Like so many precepts that bind us as adults, it’s ‘just not what grown-ups do’. Long labelled the preserve of children by the unimaginative, an adult in a tree is drunk, deranged, suicidal – or a combination of all three. We are denied the pleasures of the trees by our own self-policing, by the roles we assume in this protective and circumscribing society.