Hey NS, what’s up? My names Hank, and I am a 19 year old that moved to Breckenridge at the beginning of the winter. I want to tell you why I ski.
Let me start off by setting the mental state in which I truly discovered this for myself. It was a long day of filming, and one clouded with exhaustion and an unwillingness to face fear. I had a bad evening at work, where as a commission only job, I didn’t make a single sale that shift. I was running out of money, and feeling a sense of disconnect with my skiing. I personally think it happens to everyone now and then, and has the potential to control an entire seasons a precious few months to us manically dedicated snow freaks. Anyway. I decided to unwind, and maybe move toward getting my skiing back in sync. So I loaded my backpack with tea, whiskey, weed, and headed up to the lip of Jump 4, Freeway.
I’m not going to expound upon the thoughts I had on the jump about my own skiing, because I feel that you should all experience this while up here, or at your home park for yourself. I do advise that it is on a clear night. I’m going to skip to my thought train on the walk home.
Skiing is not my only passion. I am very near, if not completely as fascinated by writing. Up until a few months before I graduated high school, I was intent on going straight to college, and not necessarily one I could ski at. However, I pursued skiing, for reasons I was not entirely sure of,but have come to recognize.
People often commended me on how I was gutsy or whatever to ‘seize the moment’ and ‘do it while you can’ when I announced that I wasn’t going to college. They thought I was taking the more courageous path than the well-paved one of college education. The truth was the exact opposite. I realized while walking down ski hill road that I was more afraid of writing than trying to toss myself into space for a living.
This realization was an immense shock to me; a locked up history of why I feared the life of a writer more than that of a skier. I understood though. It was a fear of failure to run out of time. To die before I was able to put anything permanent onto this earth. A work reveled in times past my own. I was scared that I would die disappointed in myself. But why did dying like this scare me so much? Why was I afraid of dying. Why are all humans afraid of dying? Because we are terrified of ending our life, spiteful of ourselves, filled with regret and unfulfilled journeys.
Then, it came to me. I was filled with a sense of connectivity to the mountain; to the stars. The way to live in peace with impending death? By living in each moment as though it truly was your last. Waking up each morning with the felicity of someone who had died the night before. If we live every moment in connectivity with ourselves, and the possibility of losing ourselves, then we are living in harmony with our universe. We are surrendering our own guaranteed safety to expand our view of where we can go within ourselves. When we die, as we certainly shall eventually, we will simply be closer to dying in a timeless moment; which would be to live forever. To truly try to live every possible moment in a way content enough to die the next, without regret. That is how you can exist harmoniously with your own fears. Facing the possibility of failure pain, and self destruction, to feel unbound by regret. And to all of you on Newschoolers, I think we all know how to do that best. I know I do now.
-[Hank]
