Learning to ski has shown me a metaphor for living as a conscientious adult in a world filled with risk.
The first thing one learns is to stand on the skis and balance. But this is not skiing.
Then one learns to move on the skis. But this is not skiing either.
Learning to stop and turn on the skis feels like skiing, but this is also not skiing.
I think that the reward of skiing, aside from the aesthetic pleasure of snow, and cold, and hot chocolate, is the calculation and assumption of escalating risk for escalating reward. The reward is of course, this strange tension that humans enjoy through all sorts of recreational physics, whether skiing, or roller coasters, or skydiving. On one side there is the action of unmitigated physics upon the human body, and the certainty with which they will drive us into descent, disability, and death. We have an innate fear of this, and we should. On the other side, there is the control of those physics through skill and calculation. The greater the risk, the steeper the slope, the more dire the consequences of losing control, the more satisfying the exercise of control becomes. And so it goes.
As a novice skier who finds himself in a particularly introspective place in life, these lessons were as important as anything I could have read in a book. There was a specific moment that I remember on a saturday evening run in blizzard conditions that left me with a latent feeling that something significant had happened, and that feeling has persisted for several days now so I must write about it. I imagine that every novice skier experiences this: seeing the bottom of a small but steep slope, uncertain of our ability to stop on that slope but confident that we can stop at the bottom of that slope. We pause for a moment to calculate those risks and those rewards, and we just let go. We surrender ourselves. We relinquish control for a moment knowing that we will regain it again.
As it is with life. A person who does not risk is living a futile existence. A person who does not calculate is a danger to themselves and others. Somewhere in between lies our best and fullest life, and the extent to which we might experience it depends on our ability to do both of those things in some kind of harmonious tension that escalates over time.
This is about challenging ourselves. This is about overcoming fear. This is about getting up after we have fallen down, and falling down again before getting up again just to fall down again. This is not an external struggle of human versus nature; this is an internal struggle of human versus self. We have all been hurt. We have all protected the scars of that hurt from being torn open again. We have all imagined the best and worst outcomes of a situation and stood idle at the top of that slope, unwilling to tip ourselves over the edge to find out which one will occur.
This brings me to traversal. The novice skier learns to traverse a slope from side to side and descend in a controlled way. There is still risk on one end of an axis. There is still control on the other end. The only thing left to do is to modulate along that axis without ending up completely on one end of it. If we can do this, then we will be getting somewhere. We will be taking greater risks, asserting greater control, and reaping more rewards as we develop and improve, inhaling and exhaling, each at our own pace and on our own path. As that pendulum swings back and forth, our life will be in constant, beautiful motion and we might even feel a harmony inside of us is beginning to develop.
This is not about skiing. Skiing showed this to me. Skiing let me feel this in a very direct and tangible way. This is about letting go of the past and accelerating into the future, even if it’s slowly at first.