[Anxiety - V]
A ski instructor told me once, “Lean forward and press your shins against your boots. Trust your skis. Don’t forget: skiing is just controlled falling down really steep hills.”
That advice is why my friend JP’s analogy between a ski’s edge and anxiety is meaningful to me. Skiing, he says, “Is a dance of risk, fear, courage, which propels me down the run.” On the mountain, he “seek[s] to find that space, no wider than a ski’s edge, in which I’m simultaneously fully in control and momentarily loosing it.” The ski’s edge—a thin, sharpened strip of steel that runs the length of each ski—is what determines the difference between control and crashing.
Life is also a balance between control and crashing. The thinner the “edge” between the two on the mountain . . . the more adrenaline. The thinner the edge in life . . . the more anxiety.
Anxiety is not a cognitive construct. It's not a mental analysis of data. But it’s not entirely disassociated from the mind, either. Anxiety reminds us that our body and mind are closely, and often mysteriously, connected. We intuit, sense, and embody the shrinking distance between:
Control and chaos.
Order and disorder.
Balancing and crashing.
Life, like skiing, is controlled falling. With practice, we learn to grow comfortable with the counterintuitive sensation of tumbling forward.
Practice.
Lean forward.
Trust your skis.
