The Climb

Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Journey

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I’ve been dreaming of mountain climbing recently.

I don’t know why this has been happening. I’ve never done it outside of those artificial ones they put up in malls. I haven’t fallen down a streaming rabbit hole and spent an excessive amount of time watching climbing videos (that time is exclusively reserved for watching videos about LA’s public transit, thank you very much). No part of me wants to be up on a cliff face with only a piece of rope standing between myself and certain doom.

And yet, the dreams keep taking place.

Each time they happen, I’m already mid-climb, waking up in one of those cliff tents that you see professional climbers use. I’m always about halfway up the cliff, and the views are gorgeous, with a clear sight of the forest below and some other mountains in the distance. It is hauntingly beautiful, the kind of sight that people pay good money to witness at least once.

Then the dread comes in as I realize I still need to climb the rest of the mountain.

There is an immediate thought that drifts through my mind that I could just rappel back down and save myself the trouble of climbing, but I think on a subliminal level I recognize that this is a dream and there’s no harm in continuing to climb up. And so I climb up, slowly but surely. Sometimes I slip, and it feels like a scene from Cliffhanger is playing out, and sometimes I do start falling only to grab the rope and stop myself. But I always keep climbing up, slowly but surely.

I never reach the top before I wake up. Sometimes the “day” wraps up neatly and I set up another hanging campsite despite having no idea how it is supposed to look. Other times I’ll wake up in the middle of a fall. But I never wake up after reaching the top; it always remains as a goal that has yet to be attained.

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It’s always hard to start something new, even if you’re doing the same thing you’ve always done.

Take my job, for example. No, it’s not writing here, as awesome as that would be; I’m a high school social science teacher by trade. For the past four years, I have been employed by the same high school, teaching Government and Economics and occasionally World History if the requirements are there. I got to coach the boy’s basketball team on the side. Life was good.

This summer was a complete upheaval of that system. To make a long story short, the executive director at the school had not done a good job of managing the finances, and we went from being in a healthy spot to suddenly being massively over budget and having to consider shutting the doors for good (for what its worth, this has become a frighteningly common reality for many schools in the wake of COVID funding being sunset). Several austerity measures were put into place. People lost their jobs, including many of my friends. I’m still employed at the school but my job has changed drastically, as I now teach 6th, 7th, and 8th grade history on top of my high school workload.

The changes at the school were widespread and sudden, but among the remaining staff here, it prompted a renewed sense of purpose. We had only two options at the start of this year: we could either wallow in self-pity and let the depressing state of the past three months bleed into the year, or we could forge ahead and create a new resilient school identity in the face of all the chaos. There’s a saying (paraphrased) that you learn who you are once you go through a difficult situation, and the thing we’re learning each day is just how resilient we are in the face of uncertainty. At any point, we could have gotten off this mountain, but we kept climbing forward.

I wish I could say it has been easy, but we’re still dealing with the effects of a generation that lost an entire year of socialization and stunted childhood development. The students have problems with recognizing how to behave and interact; one student even flipped me the bird this week while telling me she wasn’t going to do her classwork. But I don’t keep track of the negatives, as it would get too bleak too quickly. Instead, I focus on the positives, on the students who have immediately figured out what they’re supposed to do and how to succeed. I think about my homeroom students, now juniors who are showing a level of emotional maturity that I did not think was possible when they started high school. I think about my basketball team, full of athletes who have been with me for a few years now, and how they are already coming out for conditioning as they recognize the path to a league title in front of them. I think about my former students, who have all graduated and gone on to college, and how their siblings love giving me updates on how well they’re doing. It’s those positives that help me keep stepping forward.

That said, there’s a drudgery with any sort of work that can make it feel monotonous. You clock in, perform your tasks, and clock out. You climb one step up towards some nebulous goal that sits at the top of a cliff face. Every time you think you’re close, you wake up and realize you have to continue the climb the next day. Even if you think you’ve reached the top of the mountain, there’s the realization that there is always a bigger mountain waiting behind it.

That gets into the UCLA football of it all. There’s a new head coach this year in Deshaun Foster, along with a new offensive coaching staff and several new players. You might have seen the season preview, there in all of its glory. It’s been a long time since I covered a new football coach, but there is a sort of monotony to the proceedings after a while. The new coach comes in with great fanfare, with supporters exaggerating all of the success they will soon bring while naysayers scream to anyone who will listen that this is a mistake. Recruiting picks up for a bit. The coach says all the right things at first, but there’s very little to dig into. At a certain point, we all start getting antsy waiting for actual football games to begin so we can have real data to discuss.

Every football program has a different mountain to climb. For most, the ultimate mountain is a national championship, but even a winner like Michigan knows that winning one can only satisfy you for a time; eventually, you have to start the climb again. Other programs might settle for smaller goals like making a bowl game or beating your rival. Some fans would even accept the goal of “don’t embarrass me this year”. But there’s a fixation on that mountaintop that is, in many ways, unhealthy. Ohio State fans have been clamoring for the firing of their head coach for the sin of losing to Michigan in an otherwise flawless season. Florida State fans have already declared this season to be a failure after one loss.

Being a college football fan is, on some level, an acceptance that you will experience failure far more than you will find success, but so many have seemingly forgotten that the journey is something to be savored and instead have turned the sport into an all-or-nothing proposition. It makes sense, especially in the afterglow of conference realignment and with the entire sport staring down the barrel of a complete restructuring of how the sport will work. But it also means that so many people have decided that the destination is all that matters and have forgotten what it is like to enjoy the journey.

I don’t profess to know the future. I have theories for how the Deshaun Foster era will play out, sure, but I can’t be certain of them any more than any other fan. However, I am slowly starting to understand that the destination for this program may not matter. Or at least, I am starting to understand that it is healthier for me not to stress about the destination at all.

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This is the fifth UCLA football season for us here at The Mighty Bruin, which means I’ve officially been writing here longer than I did for Bruins Nation. That still feels weird to think about.

This is also the fifth Opener I’ve written, a tradition I started back during the COVID season and have expanded upon each year since. They’ve slowly moved away from outright football talk and moved more into the land of meditation, discussing ideas like the emotional toll of being a fan and the concept of moving on. It’s the one chance a year I get to flex some rhetorical muscle, and I abuse that opportunity.

But five years seems like a good point to reflect on how we got here and where we’re at. It’s hard to remember at this point but we launched this site right as the world was shutting down at the start of the COVID pandemic. That first year featured a new athletic director and a change in apparel sponsorship from Under Armour to Jordan, and the following year featured even bigger news when UCLA announced that they were leaving the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten. More upheaval has hit the college sports landscape since we started the site, from the creation of the transfer portal to the rise of NIL and collectives. We’re on the precipice of colleges being able to pay players outright soon. This season in particular represents a major sea change, as Chip Kelly is no longer in charge of the program and we begin the Deshaun Foster era.

Bill Walton is gone.

In the time I’ve been here, I got to cover one of the wildest rides in recent UCLA basketball history, write about the failure of the athletic department to rise to the occasion, and wrote about NIL in a way that got David Woods to call me “an absolute moron”. P.S. The Men of Westwood have made a host of changes since I wrote that article that pushed it more in line with what I thought they should do. Crazy how that happens.

On some level, I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with the work we do here. I’m a perfectionist at heart, and I often get frustrated with what we can do and what we cannot do because, at the end of the day, this is not the focus for Joe or myself. We have actual jobs that demand our attention, which means that we can’t focus on covering as much of UCLA as we want. I wish we could cover the non-revenue sports more. I wish we could have better access to the teams and cultivate a larger informant network to break news for the readers. I wish we had more time to do deeper dives into small topics. I wish I had written more in the offseason just to provide readers with something. I am forever shocked and eternally humbled that anyone would send us a little money for our work, and I feel that I constantly let you down by not putting out more. That’s my burden to bear.

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Dreams are windows into the subconscious. They take some idea or lingering feeling that a person has and manifest themselves in a myriad of ways. Whole fields of study are dedicated to understanding why we dream and what our dreams mean. Those people are charlatans; you can get the same information from your local psychic for much less money.

So why this specific climbing dream? The easy answer is to say that I feel I’ve yet to achieve some goal or feel unfulfilled in life, but honestly, I have a lot of things going well for me. I still have a job that pays me enough to live comfortably. I have a supportive family and friend group. Things are going well with my girlfriend, though she will be experiencing me during football season for the first time, so pray for her. Could things be better? Absolutely. But they’re also pretty good right now.

In economics, my students are currently learning the basics of scarcity, about how our wants are unlimited but we only have finite resources to satisfy them. I’ve been stuck on this idea since that lesson, about how we humans always want more and more. It’s selfish, sure, but it’s also human nature. We are always climbing towards that next goal, achievement, or new shiny item or life moment that we hope will bring us the satisfaction we crave but ultimately just leads us to the next mountain to climb.

It was this realization that finally unlocked that dream for me. The ending of the dream is always different but the beginning is always the same. That morning view is always perfect no matter what I do afterwards. The dream isn’t telling me that I’m feeling unfulfilled, but rather that I’m not stopping to enjoy the beauty of the moment. The climb will always be there, but you have to stop and be in the moment from time to time.

To bring it back around, UCLA football has been on a perpetual climb for the better part of its existence. For some fans, the Deshaun Foster era represents the beginning of a new climb, while for others this is just another ledge to gather your breath before continuing upwards. But no matter where you are in your UCLA fandom or how you view this season, I urge you to pause for a moment and simply take a step back. Take some time to enjoy the little things, like the experience at the tailgate or the thrill of watching these young men do what they love. Sit in the stands and close your eyes, letting the sounds of the stadium paint a picture more vividly than your eyes ever could. Savor the journey, but don’t give short shrift to the place you’re in at this exact moment. You might enjoy the destination a bit more when you get there.

As for me? I’ll be sitting right here on my little ledge, taking it all in.

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