Dear Old Companions: Effort, Progress, Betterment, Frustration, and Okay-ness,
I am trying to re-arrange my mind's stupid hierarchies. You know the ones I mean, the best, better, goal-oriented, value-praising, A for effort-izing that we do to ourselves, when, there must be, must be a way of less absurdity, of less striving and hunting, seeking and straining. I want the effortlessness of the behavior of gravity on water, of rain, or dust motes that float in light. No, I don't mean in my skating (although, yes, of course!), I mean in my thinking about the past and future of my skating. Yeah, I want the now, and I bet you do too, but there it comes again: why is this only as far as you have come? I don't mean the raw number of days; those are immutable facts and they are fine, very fine: 2200 days of skating. The Trouble lies in other metrics; the Progress. How I wish I'd never met Progress! Blah; I hate him!
Still, from these broken bits of feelings and memories, let me try to make something we can use: my message today, from the land of daily skating, is that we cannot let our goal be to 'get better,' because sometimes we don't improve, we don't progress, we might, even, Never Actually Get There. "There" in this case being a three-turn that finishes in skating on the skating foot, with the other remaining suspended above the floor. Even for a second!!! This is sounding like Frustration, and there has been some, certainly, but I am aiming for a place where even that is okay. I think pretending might lead to embodiment, so let us spend the final paragraph pretending towards a non-goal, an okay-ness.
Next time we talk about roller skating, another 100 days may have passed, and I may have tried the Forward Outside Three Turn another 1,000 times, and I may not have tried it even once, but, we will meet here and I will suggest that skating is it's own reward, although, that reward is not conventional, not transferable, and not Valuable. The reward is the non-reward, the entirely voluntary nature of rolling with wheels on your feet for no reason, heading no-where. It's a feeling you maybe forgot, but you probably had it when you were a kid: a feeling that you are building your own thing, here, this experience of life, and it was all yours. I won't use that abused and manipulating four letter word that starts with f, but you know what I mean.
PS Here is a fine tune for today, and what a glorious cavalcade of roller skaters!
