Snowboarding — Not my Thing
There’s magic in the art of snowboarding. The athlete becomes the artist pressing long, smooth strokes across a frozen landscape — a cursive ballet painted with a flat, boarded brush across an empty canvas framed by mountain peaks. Yesterday, Anna and I went snowboarding at a mountain just outside of Beijing and were excited to be joining in such an elegant dance for the first time! As it happened, Anna was able to swish down the mountain with grace and joyful elegance.
I, however, have no talent in snowboarding.
In fact, my skill in the sport is more and an imbecility than talent. While I had been instructed on how to descend the slope slowly like a feather, my actual journey had more in common with a tumbling snowball than any floating fluff. My mind perfectly understands what should be happening — the physics made sense and the instructions are clearly printed on mental note cards that I pass on to the rest of my body, but in this transfer of information there is some sort of translation error and my muscles cannot understand the job they are supposed to do, causing my rear to be quickly planted in the snow while I nurse another bruise.
After such crashes, I have a choice. I could shout a stream of explicit remarks into the world, cursing the cold breaths of hell that must have created snow and damn my physical form for not complying with what makes perfect sense in my mind — or I could laugh and try again. In truth, yesterday I did a mixture of both responses, but it was when the laughter allowed me to try again that I felt best. I was on a beginner slope, I wore decent gear including a helmet, and I was in a relatively safe location — perhaps I would fail but there was no better place to try, and if I didn’t try I would never succeed, so I tried again. There were even a few (three) times when I would stay standing on the board for nearly a hundred meters, and in those seconds the experience was breathtaking, until some unnecessary twitch sent me to meet the ground again. I never succeeded.
I wish this could be a story of how determination creates success, but instead it’s a story of hoe determination creates baseball sized black-and-blue marks on my tush the next morning (pictures of my rear are not included, but trust me, they are big bruises). This is one task in which I failed, and did so rather miserably, but I refuse to regret a thing. The temptation to writhe in self-pity has occurred to me, but then I considered how many alternative talents I do have. I don’t mean this in a manner of fluffing my feathers to brag about skills, but as a way to consider the reality of the situation — I am terrible at snowboarding, and while flying down mountainsides is a dream I may never achieve, it is only one thing. There are so many things I can do. In regards to snowboarding, some may suggest, “Don’t give up,” and “Just try again, you'll get it.” I don't believe this – I might return to the slopes and I may even improve, but it is with reasonable confidence that I predict I will never be good. What's important is that I don’t need to care about that.
Life is an opportunity to try, and when we do so sometimes succeed and fly, but also sometimes fall. A person is not and should not be good at everything — stay humble. There may be activities we wish we could achieve but just don’t have an aptitude in that area, and that’s okay. These could be athletic, intellectual, artistic, aesthetic or in any other aspect of living — there are some things in every realm that you’re good at, and other things that need a lot of work. And that’s fine. Don’t get hung up on what you can’t do, but appreciate the talent another person has when something is difficult — say, “That’s amazing. I love that, but there is no way can I do it.” I suggest you give almost anything a try, and if you want you can improve, but if that’s not where your talents lie, recognize the many other things you can do.
I gave it a try, and snowboarding is NOT my talent. If I can accept that the destination will likely be failure but still enjoy journey, I may attempt the slopes again…as long as I have a few days afterwards when I can nurse the bruises covering both my body and ego that will inevitably come from such an attempt.
Those are my thoughts, please pass them along and share yours.
