Now is the time to send it

“Hi Sarah — I am so happy to hear you are SENDING IT with your writing workshops! Amazing. I imagine it’s scary but it must be exciting.”

I got this email from a friend and former co-worker in October. We’d been sharing updates about our work lives. I told her I was teaching a new workshop (Writing for Social Media) to a smart group of Masters students at the University of Luxembourg.

She was right — it was a little scary: designing a completely new course, in a short amount of time, and delivering it in the early morning hours over Zoom, in 3-hour-long sessions!

But mostly it was exciting: new content, interesting and interested students, and a chance to return to teaching writing, which I absolutely enjoy and haven’t done in a few years.

I wrote back to thank her for the good vibes, and tell her that I was vicariously loving her more nomadic (than mine) lifestyle. “Also,” I added, “SENDING IT” all caps is my new fav phrase, thanks for that. Xoxo”

Sending it is new to me, but the phrase been around for years. If you’re a rock climber you’ve probably been saying it for a while. Urbandictionary.com offers a bounty of meanings, including this one:

Send It
Rock climbing: Used to encourage a fellow climber to finish a route or problem. Similar to and interchangeable with “allez!” (French), or “dale” (Spanish)
Come on, man, send it! – urbandictionary.com

“There was a time,” Chris Celis of Denver Bouldering Club says, “where ‘sending it’ did mean you did it correctly the first time — look at it, don’t touch it, climb it perfectly without falling at all, make it to the top.” But, Georgia Perry explains in “What Does It Mean to “Send It”?” the phrase has evolved to mean essentially to just do it.

In some versions, it means to throw caution to the wind. To do something wholeheartedly, even if it scares you. To “just do it without dying,” Celis jokes (sort of).

He’s one of the people Perry interviews to excavate the phrase more thoroughly. She talks to “climbers, retail workers, Twitter users, a linguistics professor, and even Sendy McSendersend himself to unravel the mystery of the ubiquitous phrase and where it came from.”

Sendy McSendersend? Weird, I know. He’s a Denver-based dude (real name: Dean Vaganos) who got Breckenridge Ski Resort to print “Sendy McSendersend” as his name on his ski pass. According to Perry, Vaganos defines to send it as “simply to go for it. Whether you’re about to drop into something off a chairlift, book a ticket for a big trip, or down tequila shots with your dad at a restaurant, it’s about commitment. There’s an aspect of community, too. Vaganos … regularly makes a practice of ‘screaming it at other people and other people will scream it at me. It definitely makes you commit more when other people are telling you to ‘send it,’ he says.”

So, friends, that’s my community service in this blog post: I’m telling you to SEND IT.

Are you teetering on a decision, a plunge, a final step … a first step? Whatever you’re on the brink of, whatever you’ve almost committed to, but haven’t quite been able to … consider this note from me a holler across the wintry field to just SEND IT.