Learning Curve
I tried skiing for the first time in my life a few weeks ago, right at the tail end of a string of snowstorms that had made conditions near-perfect in my neck of the woods. We planned to hit the slopes on a Sunday and started shopping for gear on Thursday, which I naively thought was plenty of time. It wasn’t. Nothing I needed was in stock anywhere. It was as if the entire world had decided this was the weekend to learn how to ski. Online ordering was useless given the turnaround time. That frantic scavenger hunt, involving multiple stores, hours of searching, and far more shopping than I can tolerate, was my first glimpse into the madness I was about to willingly enter.
The mountain itself was exactly what you’d expect: crowded, bitterly cold, mildly windy, but redeemed by bright, generous sunshine. I signed up for a group lesson for adult beginners and immediately realized I was a complete outlier. The class was full of people closer to J’s age than mine. The instructor was under twenty. None of the others were true beginners. They’d all been on skis at some point in their lives. They were rusty, but not new. This may have been their second time, but it wasn’t their first. I would not at all be surprised they they played some sports growing up. They folks had absolutely nothing in common with me. I should have been ejected from this class to be fair to them.
Over the course of the two-hour lesson, I fell in every way imaginable and at least a dozen times. My performance compromised the class’s progress entirely. Everyone waited patiently as I struggled back to my feet, joined them briefly, and then promptly fell again. The instructor offered encouragement, telling me I was doing great and that her mother had skied for the first time just last month. When I told her I was ten years older than that, she looked genuinely gobsmacked. Between the wrongly sized skis, boots that didn’t quite fit, and the humiliation of being in a class where I clearly didn’t belong, I was given the rare opportunity to fail spectacularly over and over and over again.
By the final ten minutes, it all tipped into absurdity. I couldn’t complete a single assigned task without a debacle that had me on the snow twisted like a pretzel. I was wasting everyone’s time with the falls, re-strapping boots, and trying to obey instructions my sore, exhausted body simply could not follow even if my mind wanted to. Eventually, I stepped aside. Not in defeat exactly, but in recognition of futility. And yet, the experience stayed with me. It forced me to think about how I understand failure and recovery in the rest of my life. It made me realize how often I engineer conditions where I’m competent, prepared, and therefore successful, and how rare it is for me to willingly place myself somewhere I will unquestionably fail. Which is precisely why I know I need to try skiing again.
The mountain itself was exactly what you’d expect: crowded, bitterly cold, mildly windy, but redeemed by bright, generous sunshine. I signed up for a group lesson for adult beginners and immediately realized I was a complete outlier. The class was full of people closer to J’s age than mine. The instructor was under twenty. None of the others were true beginners. They’d all been on skis at some point in their lives. They were rusty, but not new. This may have been their second time, but it wasn’t their first. I would not at all be surprised they they played some sports growing up. They folks had absolutely nothing in common with me. I should have been ejected from this class to be fair to them.
Over the course of the two-hour lesson, I fell in every way imaginable and at least a dozen times. My performance compromised the class’s progress entirely. Everyone waited patiently as I struggled back to my feet, joined them briefly, and then promptly fell again. The instructor offered encouragement, telling me I was doing great and that her mother had skied for the first time just last month. When I told her I was ten years older than that, she looked genuinely gobsmacked. Between the wrongly sized skis, boots that didn’t quite fit, and the humiliation of being in a class where I clearly didn’t belong, I was given the rare opportunity to fail spectacularly over and over and over again.
By the final ten minutes, it all tipped into absurdity. I couldn’t complete a single assigned task without a debacle that had me on the snow twisted like a pretzel. I was wasting everyone’s time with the falls, re-strapping boots, and trying to obey instructions my sore, exhausted body simply could not follow even if my mind wanted to. Eventually, I stepped aside. Not in defeat exactly, but in recognition of futility. And yet, the experience stayed with me. It forced me to think about how I understand failure and recovery in the rest of my life. It made me realize how often I engineer conditions where I’m competent, prepared, and therefore successful, and how rare it is for me to willingly place myself somewhere I will unquestionably fail. Which is precisely why I know I need to try skiing again.
Filed under:
Reflections