What I Think About When I Think About Skiing

Creative activity gives life meaning, purpose, and joy. Parenting and friendship are among the most obvious of life’s joyful activities. You can also make art or conduct laboratory research. You can master a musical instrument or learn a foreign language. You can cook, quilt, or scrapbook.

But some of us also seek dangerous and strenuous physical activities that tests our limits and remind us of our mortality. We climb mountains, run marathons, or compete in contact sports. We enjoy the sweat and adrenaline. The burning muscles and the risk are delightful.

To be human is not merely to work, eat, and sleep. We also enjoy the delight of moving gracefully across the earth. Human beings are free and playful beings who decorate the planet with color and light, beauty and gladness.

Wonder, Beauty, and Joy

Skiing combines the thrill of speed with the serenity of ice-covered mountains. It involves the camaraderie of the ski lift and the après-ski bar, as well as the quiet solitude of evergreen trees and soft snowy glades. Skiing takes you where the mountain air is crisp and cold. It requires you to cut a path through the snow using gravity, muscle, and skill.

Skiing demands a lifetime of practice. The weather and snow conditions are ever-changing. Each slope provides a new challenge. When the wind howls and the snow turns icy, it can be nasty. But when fresh powder beckons on a bluebird day, nothing is more wonderful.

The best ski days are rare. Indeed, the sport only exists for a few precious winter months. It is the scarcity of skiing’s exquisite days that makes them so precious. And even the worst day skiing provides an opportunity to hone your craft.

When I think about skiing, I think about the fleeting nature of beauty and joy. Every so often, life presents us with wonder and delight. We should celebrate those rare gems that sparkle in the dark. Much of the time, we slog through the muck. We work and pay our taxes, do the laundry and empty the trash. But there are moments of elation that make us whoop and holler, and laugh out loud.

When I think about skiing, I think about the transformative power of those rare moments of exhilaration. At its best, skiing is pure play. Human beings are at our best when we play. Creativity and play are the source of beauty, wonder, and joy. Skiing can be like falling in love, or welcoming a newborn child, or writing a poem. The thrill of these playful jewels lingers, giving brilliant color to the dull grey of quotidian life.

Void and Presence of Mind

When I think about skiing, I also think about presence of mind, and what it takes to master an art. Mastery and effort are connected to virtue and happiness. Skiing is an activity that requires intensity of focus and deep concentration. It requires a kind of non-thinking mindfulness that is central to mastery in any art.

This state of focus and flow is enchanting. In it we discover presence and vitality. In concentrated alertness, there is no room for intrusive thoughts. On the steepest slopes, the only thing that can be thought is how to link one turn to the next.

One of my favorite novelists, Haruki Murakami, wrote a simple little book, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running. He explained, “As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”[1]

I have run a few marathons and triathlons. When you swim, you can get lost in the rhythm of breath and water. At some point, on a long run, you lose track of time. This kind of immersion in activity is what occurs in pure play, when you lose yourself in activity.

Skiing provides access to the void, necessitated by the speed and danger of the sport. On the top of a steep slope, you inch your skis out over the edge. You peer into the abyss. And then you leap. Once launched, instinct takes over. You can’t think about what you are doing. Instead, your body moves itself, responding to the slope, the snow, and the pull of gravity. Your hips, quads, and core engage. You turn to slow your fall. And then, you turn again and again, dancing across the fall line, carving a curving line with grace and skill. Distraction means disaster, as you play with gravity.

In each turn, there is a moment of freedom as you fall and accelerate. You control your descent by driving your skis into the snow. The skis bend. You feel a bounce. And then you turn again. In powdery snow, the motion is less forceful and more free. Your skis float and flow. You ride them on a cushion of snowflakes and cold air.

Somewhere in these turns, the void is found. Yes, you are thinking. The mind races along with your skis, looking for bumps and surveying the ever-changing condition of the snow. You feel gravity’s pull, the pressure of boots on shins, and a burning in the quads. There are ten thousand things present in your mind. But also, you are skiing in the void. Present to the mountain, attuned to the snow, you are lost in mindful emptiness.

Skiing everywhere

Murakami employs running as a metaphor for writing. Writing requires endurance, focus, and continuous training. Intense concentration occurs when writing. The mind expands to include sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. When presence and void occur in writing, the words flow through you and you disappear into the page.

Skiing is like that. There are moments when you disappear and there is nothing but motion and snow. It is gravity that does the work, pulling you down the fall line. All you do is control the fall, carving the snow in graceful turns.

This effort can be intense, and the void is hard to find. Beginners are exhausted after their first grueling journeys across the snow. But skill and experience make it easier and more playful. The master skier reaches the bottom quickly and with style. His thighs still burn. But instead of exhaustion, his expertise produces exhilaration.

Disciplined practice leads to elegant poise in all kinds of creative activity. The artists of life are accomplished skiers who know where to turn, when to slow down, and when to gather speed. Their motion is precise, controlled, and graceful. They still feel the pain and understand the danger of dancing across the fall line. But rather than struggling against gravity, they transform existence into play. Their falling becomes a poem or a song.

Samuel Beckett once said of human beings, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” This is a cynical indictment of a meaningless universe. Skiers know better. We savor the light and enjoy the ride. If life is a process of plunging through time and across space, we can dance as we descend. We can transform our falling into a nimble work of art. No one can stop gravity or time. But we can control our speed. We can seek smoother snow and carve graceful turns. And every so often, there is bliss on a bluebird day.

[1] Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (New York: Knopf, 2008), Chap. 1.