The moguls again

If you have ever skied a major mountain, you have seen a slope with moguls. Considered by some to be the most difficult skiing terrain, moguls are hard white mounds of snow formed by human hands, dotted evenly across an entire slope. From far away, this makes a moguls slope look like a sheet of bubble wrap. To ski the moguls is to constantly be twisting your body, without the ability to choose your desired course. You are subject instead to the path dictated for you by a slope designed with the sole intention of challenge.

I have been a skier since I was four years old. Like many children who learn a sport young, I engaged in it fearlessly and at times recklessly. Most of the time, I didn’t want to ski on the regular slopes. I wanted to ski the moguls. No one else in my family ever wanted to ski the moguls, but I was too young to go alone, so my dad leapt on the grenade every time.

I was absolutely terrible at skiing the moguls. I would ski for a few feet, managing part of a fishtail arc between one of the moguls, then fall. Get up, ski another few feet, then fall. Get up, go two feet, fall. This would last for the entire length of the slope.

Perhaps you are imagining that I would get tired of this, that I might start to cry, or at least whine. I’m sure most of those other skiers assumed that I wasn’t having any fun, or that my dad shouldn't have let me on the slope. They weren’t entirely off base — I don’t remember having “fun” skiing the moguls. I remember thinking that the moguls were extremely hard. I remember falling down and sitting in the snow,  looking up at my dad as he waited, patiently, for me to get up again. But above all I remember thinking, “Good skiers can ski the moguls, and I want to be a good skier. So, I have to keep doing this.” Nothing meant more to me.

The way to learn how to ski the moguls is not to ski the moguls over and over and over again, though. The way to get better at the moguls is to learn how to ski better on more ordinary slopes, and to perfect your turning abilities and your slalom maneuvering. I didn’t really improve at all of that stuff until my teen years, when I started skiing with other kids my age and wanted to impress people (read: boys) by skiing black diamonds. During that same time period, and with that same group of friends (boys), I got into playing competitive video games. As a teenager, I understood the lesson that my child self had only distantly grasped, in skiing the moguls over and over. The point was to keep trying. Meeting the challenge was its own reward.

I have learned that many other people do not approach life in the way that I approached the moguls, and eventually, video games, and even more eventually, journalism as a career. That is to say, when I fail, I keep on going. That doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated or even rageful inside when I am repeatedly failing at something difficult. But I don’t stop. I throw myself at challenges with an abandon that has, at times, been irresponsible and even harmful to me.