So I was writing a post about running, and maybe one day I will finish it and put it up here, but I have to just take some time to talk about what happened at Squaw Valley, my home mountain, and today the stage for a tragic accident ending the life of a great freeskier, CR Johnson, while he was training for the Free Ride tour being held at Squaw on Saturday. He recovered from a horrible brain injury in 2005 that left him temporarily paralyzed and was back on skis as soon as possible because skiing was his one true love, his passion, and as he said in a video for Freeskier magazine, his reason for living. Hauntingly, he says "The joy I get from skiing...that's worth dying for" in this video.
Damn. Life is short. Live it up. Or ski it up.
Combined with the loss of Shane McConkey, this has been a rough year for Squaw skiers and the freeskiing community in general. We all know it's a dangerous sport, we wear our helmets and we are cautious in the trees, but it's always sobering when something like this happens and we realize how fragile life truly is, and especially how much we tempt it and dare it with our activities.
But you really cannot beat an attitude like CR's. It makes you think, about what life is worth to you, and about how you want to live it, and about how following your passion(s) and facing challenges head on, with a smile the whole way through, because you can. Because I can still ski, because I can still smile while I float down the mountain, I will do so with great pleasure and immense joy.
Lately I feel like I've been riding the happiness train. I've felt this positive energy coming at me from a lot of angles and I'm trying to run with it and I've been pretty successful so far. Life is good. Side note, it appears this has turned into my hippy, vibe-y, energy loving entry, and of course this is a requisite on the blog because my life has turned into a bit of a hippy, vibe-y, energy experiment that is working out really well.
For all of our passions, for all of the things that keep us going throughout the day, whether it is a person, a moment, a touching action, an inspiring thought, a beautiful image, a conversation, nature, a friend, anything, take a minute to love it, truly love it. Put that energy out there, and feel it come back because it always does. My friend Cole once told me a couple of years ago, when I asked him why he was so generous, what were his motivations for being such a generous person, that he felt that his generosity would come back to him in some way. This always stuck with me for a variety of reasons. I was impressed with the thought, and it was sort of the first time I had heard this philosophy applied to the life of the college kid, where everything seems bigger than it is and perspective gets lost in the hustle and bustle of academia and social pressure (it's more like social pressure followed by academia, priorities are a little weird in college). I have tried to adopt this philosophy, as I think Cole has as well, in all aspects of my life. What you give inevitably comes back to you. It's like the overquoted but no less brilliant John Lennon, "and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." There are a lot of guides to happiness out there, and at my ripe old age of infinite wisdom (Ha) I have boiled them all down to that one. Positivity, realistic optimism in the face of adversity, is the only way to live the gift we have been given and the only way to truly fulfill our own dreams, and to make the people who have gone before us, like CR Johnson, proud of us.
"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light." -Albus Dumbledore
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment