just got the new powder mag and thought the letter of the month was quite good and worth sharing.
''Im writing in responce to yet another romanticized death in the mountains. Im not saying its morally wrong to die while skiing, but spiritually clumsy. When we place ourselves in situations where death is our companion, we seek a heightened state of awareness - a quality of attention that is absent in ordinary life. This state of mind is central to spiritual traditions all over the world through practices such as meditation. Its what Ram Dass was talking about in the sixties when he famously said ''Be here now''. The question is: What does it take to ''be here now'' Does it take facing death to wake me up? The failure to wake up, persisting over a lifetime, results in a profound loss - essentially missed your own life, which is prolonged death. What the death romantics do not understand is that the monk in meditation, with his face to the wall, or the grandmother in Dubuque drinking her cup of tea, can be as fully absorbed in the present moment as the guy who is skiing a line that will kill him if he falls.
The mistake is to believe that only extreme stimulus can wake us up. A lot of men, and sometimes whole cultures, romanticize the experience of combat for the same reason. They remember, and get nostalgic about the quality of attention elicited by the proximity of death.
We celebrate the same extremity in skiing, which is an unfortunate move in the wrong direction. People who need to face death in order to feel alive are symptoms, not celebrities. They are the poster children of a culture that is so desensitized that only the loudest sensations can reach those dead places inside.''
maybe the guy is thinking a bit too deep about skiing, but i agree with him a bit, part of why I love skiing is cos it puts me 'in the moment' like if you fuck up u could die/hurt ur self. But is that the wrong reason to enjoy skiing? should we seek that feeling of beiing 'in the moment' from everyday life / drinking a cup of tea? maybe this is too deep haha
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