Verbosity on Occasion

Have you ever been snowboarding? It's difficult! Snowboarding is like surfing on firm water, ok, obviously, anyway I didn't want to talk literally. I'm lying here tonight trying to sleep and I'm drawing a parallel between life and snowboarding. You can decorate your life however you want, it doesn't really matter how you look to the other snowboarders and as long as you have your basics in order you're going to survive (pants for the cold = food for survival). Follow the metaphor and you can begin to discuss how our life is a path down a mountain, etc. Fill in the cliches about the passage of time and the development in life yourself. What applies specifically is that if you hit a bump or a snag or crash into someone or something, it can stop your progress and with snowboarding it can be a real pain to get back onto your feet. But it's impossible to improve on a snowboard without actually being upon it, believe me I've tried to learn academically. Reading how to snowboard is like using an anatomy book to tell you who you are, it's not going to cover any of the things that make you individual. Anyway, the thing is, you've got to get up and keep going or things aren't going to get better. Ok, so why snowboarding and not rodeo or skateboarding or any other "fall off your horse" sport? Well, for one I'm trying to plan a trip for this December and I've got snowboarding on my mind, but the real truth is that in snowboarding if you let yourself start worrying about how you're doing, how fast you're going (through life), or how you look, or where you're headed too much, you'll mess up, your body tenses at these things and you get in your own way and your progress stops. That's what I've been doing, I've been worrying so much that I've not made any progress and when I've fallen down I've just sat their in the snow worrying that much further down the mountain is where I'm going to break a leg or fall off a cliff. I remember last winter when I was skiing for the third day ever and I was exhausted. I sat in the snow on the side of a run for about 10 minutes, and the wisdom from that experience was if you sit in the snow too long your ass is going to get cold and you won't have gotten any further along. It might take some serious effort, but I also remember that when I got back up after those 10 minutes I made my fastest, most fun path down the run the entire trip. Good times are ahead!