I returned last night from four days of skiing with college friends Charlie and Curt in New Hampshire. The weather was ideal and the snow conditions nearly perfect.
Since this was the first time since last February that I had skied, my skiing was at times imperfect, my control often borderline.
Skiing is unlike bicycle riding in that it all doesn't necessarily come back to you once you step into the bindings. But it is like bicycle riding in the sense that to do it successfully requires faith. Even more so than bicycle riding, skiing is a fine metaphor for how we succeed or fail in life.
I had skied from the age of five when I joined the ski team my freshman year in college. I was in great physical shape and, in the autumn training which involved a lot of running, I excelled. Once the snow fell, however, I discovered how inadequate I was as a skier.
But one team member, a senior who was an elite racer and who, today, would have been an olympic candidate, took the time to explain to me the fundamentals that every good skier understood. His name was Pat Cunningham, and that he stooped to encourage and instruct a hopelessly green and untalented kid speaks to his qualities as a human being.
What Pat told me was quite simple. Keep your (body) weight forward and on the downhill ski.
When your weight is forward, it is concentrated on the balls of the feet. When wearing ski boots, your shins are pressing firmly against the tongues. There is no weight on your heels.
Your downhill ski is the one nearest the bottom of the slope. In practice, when your weight is on this ski, if you tip uphill, you can catch yourself with your uphill ski. And if you tip downhill, you can simply slip that downhill ski back under you.
The issue is that most of us have a natural fear of falling and so our normal reaction is to lean uphill, away from the danger. We'd rather have our weight on the uphill ski. We'd rather be standing on our heels if they are farther away from the dropping landscape.
Leaning back, standing on one's heels leads to disaster. When the skis slip downhill, as they certainly will thanks to gravity, you are left with no way to catch yourself. That which supports you -- the skis -- have abandoned you and you fall.
In order to ski successfully and in control, you must lean forward and embrace the danger. And here to me is the metaphor. Success in any endeavor requires diving fearlessly into it, abandoning all reservations, flushing from your mind any potential negative consequences, adopting totally the confidence that you will succeed.
It takes me a few days before I can reach this blissful state every moment I am riding skis. And so, in any one run, I may be doing extremely well in the business of committing myself and, the next moment, be sitting on my heels, unconciously retreating from the constant threat presented by the slope.
Four days was not enough to get past the flaws.
But there were those moments, those exhillerating few seconds when, approaching the crest of an extremely steep pitch, I was able to throw myself forward, leaving feet behind, bending body in order to angle the steel edge of the downhill ski sharply into the firm snow so that it bit into the crust, directing the inertia of my plummeting body left or right, again and again, slingshotting from one turn to the next as the speed built.
In those moments of abandon lie ecstacy, the life fully lived.