Who Is On Aux?

And, the new rules of beer pong.

I just spent the dreamiest week in Northern Michigan at a summer camp with a lot of my family.

We stayed in cabins by a sparkling lake. I spent a lot of time doing yoga, walking in the woods, making friendship bracelets, and thinking about how I can live life better!

I also had a very humbling experience on a ropes course where I ugly cried before I took an incredibly ungraceful fall. It then led to me learning the meaning of “on aux” from a real live teen.

Okay, fine. I’ll tell you about it.

I decided it would be fun to do the ropes course with my husband, my cousin and his teen daughter. The course begins with a tall climbing rock wall. So, I got on a harness, a helmet and on the auto-belay system, and stared up to assess my path.

I used to love climbing and considered myself a pretty decent climber in my youth. Halfway up the wall I was tired and I just kept thinking, “Why am I doing this?,” but I pushed on. I finally got the top after my cousin and a couple of the teens who were working the course cheered me on.

Once up on the course, I was so tuckered from climbing the wall that I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be there either.

I walked across the first challenge. And got to a platform where I asked the teen staff, “How do I get down?”

This is where things got both insane and humbling. On top of this tall, rickety platform this teen told me I just had to JUMP off. Like free-fall. And the auto-belay system would kick in and bring me down gently. Auto-belay = robot. I looked off the platform. I assume I was at least 25-30 feet off the ground. And the teen Grace just acted like this was no big deal. It was like she was saying, “Leap to your death, but also don’t worry about it cause a robot will save you.”

I began to ask teen Grace more questions, trying to play it “cool” while I tried to wrap my head around that. She looked me dead in the eyes and said “It’s better if you stop stalling and just do it.” At that point, I just started crying. Me, in my mid-forties just plain sobbing to a teen about jumping off a platform. It only got more humbling from there.