We’ve been in the Lake Tahoe area this Christmas and beyond; so many inspirations, even more that were half written and I never had my laptop for quite long enough to complete and post…
This my favourite picture of the trip
You see, I took the same picture 7, 8 years ago:
Tiny Rockstar is not yet 3 in this photo; we went into the restaurant (which had too long a queue for us to actually eat there this time) to show them the two pics
…right after…
…this. Squaw Valley Kids have a full snow school program, Squaw Valley/ Alpine Meadows does the grownups
You might be inclined to think I’m good at snowboarding. I’m not, I’m quite bad. I saw snow for the first time in my mid-30s. I’m picking up snow sports in my 40s. In contrast, I grew up with taekwondo (and water – I learned to swim naturally when I learned to walk, without formal coaching and spending many hours playing in large and deep pools – it was years before it occurred to me the “stroke” I used, to be able to swim laps relatively indefinitely without getting tired is um, not a “real” swimming stroke haha but as an older child with no competitions or evaluations looming it was not too difficult to “convert” to a “real” stroke… I think the free time little kids increasingly used to have – to move, run, play naturally, is becoming more and more severely underrated – because I still believe you need to get to know your own body well enough, your brain needs time to learn how to move your body naturally, before you can truly get the most out of working with a professional coach.)
Your weight distribution in taekwondo is completely different from that of controlling a snowboard. (So said my board coach who did both). Therefore it takes a huge amount of my energy just to not fall hard, because the moment the board moves on the snow surface, my reflexes do all the opposite things it’s supposed to, naturally. In other words, I signed up knowing I’d be at the bottom of any snow sport class I took. I think it’s good for everyone to experience what that feels like – being “picked last” for a proverbial team. Success may build confidence, but it is failure that builds resilience. According to Carol Dweck in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, one of NASA’s selection criteria is NOT someone who chalks up success after success. They pick people who have crawled back from devastating failures.
Then again given the choice, your average instructor would prefer not to have me so some might say I’m deliberately “torturing” an instructor <sheepish>. The grownup ski/board school then assigned me an instructor who otherwise runs a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) practice in the city – qualified to work with people who have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) for eg – and comes out several days a week to coach for love of snow sports. In other words, I owe these people drinks. With loadsa alcohol. 😀
My other reason for doing this awful thing to myself is, old-dog-new-tricks – it must take decidedly wayyyyy more new neurons. I used to tell HN this story – An oyster in the vast ocean finds an irritation in its shell – inconsequential little chip of shell or rock, until it finds its way in, ugly and grating on the oyster’s delicate flesh. It does all manner of Oyster Contortions to rid itself of the Irritation, but then it throws its proverbial Oyster Hands up in the air, and tries Something Completely New. That’s when it makes a Pearl. (Like, IS THIS NOT INSPIRING?? But in true HN fashion, she deadpanned, “SO then people keep sticking things in oysters because they always want pearls” <eyeroll>.)
A-nyway, John Piper wrote Don’t Waste Your Cancer when he found he had cancer – if you don’t find a use for having to experience a terrible, terrifying, debilitating disease, you’re wasting it…
Growing up, the late Christopher Reeve was my hero. The superpower I most wanted to have as a child was the ability to fly.
He’s the only Superman I remember! – pic from theindianexpress.com
(I also “knew” I would never get to be a pilot because back before Lasik was invented I had pretty bad eyesight. In my mid-20s I then took considerably more time with a surgeon who preferred to do the procedure relatively much more slowly – because for all the vaunted medical qualifications and skill his reputation purported, he believed every patient’s recovery rate so unique as to insist on spending extra time watching the recovery on one eye, before then adjusting to suit the patient’s other eye. During the many more waiting room hours I chalked, I then remember a mum bringing in her ~12 year old son. They were trying to weigh the likely reduced chances of lasting perfect eyesight by having Lasik before the age of 18, against the increased risk of wearing glasses perpetually during full-contact Rugby which he trained extensively in.)
Anyway, back to Reeve. He became Superman for real after a horse riding accident severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralysed from the neck down. His accident was so bad his skull and spine were no longer connected. In Mindset, Carol Dweck describes how Reeve did the “impossible” – regained some movement where medical experts said he never would. He was about 43 years old when the accident happened. He took 5 long years, but when they looked at his brain, they realised he had eventually formed new connections. He regained some sensation in his body and could move his index finger enough to power a wheelchair.
I’m still on the fact he didn’t give up for 5 years. 5 years is almost HN’s entire life time. 5 years of being surrounded every day by the “fact” he would never regain movement. He considered ending his life. His wife said “You’re Still You”, and he never considered it again. I was still a student when Still Me, the book Reeve wrote following the accident, was published. It also covers his time making the Superman movies. It was so heart rending I was too terrified to read further. Reeve’s co-stars during his Superman movie run have said when he played the superhero, he wasn’t very nice. The same colleagues have said he was a much better person after the devastating accident.
I came to the Christian faith thanks to a former colleague, Janet, during the first (of eventually three) bank mergers during my former work life. Coming from a staunch Buddhist/Taoist background and decidedly “scared of Christians” as I was, still Janet walked the talk like no other I’d met, and it affected me profoundly. Janet had had a tumour at the base of her neck in her youth, and told me matter-of-factly and relatively cheerfully during all the merger noise that treatment of the tumour had likely left her permanently unable to have children. We parted ways, I began a new life in HK, and about a decade passed between when she told me that and when I heard from a mutual former colleague on the street that after being laid off she’d started up a business and found herself with a baby girl.
People who don’t believe in the power of prayer or of having a faith will say it’s all about a powerful human will. But then a faith, to begin with, is life and personality altering. You might argue that “maybe (I) don’t know enough Christians” 😀 but then I can also say that I neither know of nor can imagine someone who has the attitude of “God’ll forgive me for being this petty and I really am this petty” being blessed with “miracles” of the Janet sort. Janet may not have been an athlete, but during the most awful parts of the merger I still remember her reading a little New Testament early in the morning, checking her bright lipstick quickly and wishing everyone a bright “Good Morning!” with a smile. When many people were What’s The Point We’re All Gonna Die Be Bought Over Anyway.
What makes us insecure? Insecurity after all, is a terrible disease that makes otherwise “good” people do “terrible” out-of-character things. But that’s not the bit that makes it like – but worse than – cancer. Because insecurity is something people can inflict on others (to get what they want.)
Do People Think Imma Bad Parent is arguably a terrible weakness practically “all” us parents have, however deep down. I could be a bad driver, bad snowboarder, bad eater, maybe even a bad worker. But <shudder> “Bad Mother“? “Bad Parent”?
You know the flip side, right? The flip side is how far you’d go just to be granted the Golden Apple that says “Good Mother” on it. Needing that approval from Purveyor Of Proverbial Golden Apples gives Said Purveyor a huge power over you, ever thought of that? I mean sure, if you like them apples <shrugs>. But how d’you know if you like ’em if you don’t really know what they cost?
I’ve said before that I’m (mildly!) obsessive compulsive – it manifests partly in prices, in costs. Hidden risks and costs. Because every decision you ever make bears reward, cost and risk, and there be no reward without risk… somewhere. As I’ll (eventually!) get back to when I finish the comments-on-financial-derivatives post, you can never remove a risk, only change its form.
The imperfectness of human decisions means our risk-reward evaluation system is perpetually flawed. That brings cost and opportunity. Like risk and reward, they go together. To someone who deals in the price of a reward, as denominated by a corresponding risk and probability of it occurring, this is an endless fascination – why a single case of Mad Cow out of 10 freaking billion cows on the planet can cause massive panic – the tanking of beef futures and soaring of fish prices – while we continue to do things like leave raw meat with far more common and equally deadly bacteria on kitchen counters in homes all over the planet.
The hidden cost of making a decision you know deep down shrinks your strength of character is for me a big one. (Oh, you thought it was because Imma Good Person (And I Think You’re Not As Gooda Person)? <HUGE SNORT> 😀 I always thought people who don’t challenge themselves to be the absolute best versions of themselves…. can’t ultimately like themselves very much. I mean, you think you do, and that’s why you act selfishly because you think it pays off… but in truth it hurts your belief in yourself without you realising. If you believe you need the crutch or your child needs the crutch, what happens when you don’t have it? The loss of potential, the waste from losing that little bit of ability or credibility because of the crutch kinda grates on my nerves. (And the real one is almost always gonna be in your head. It’s also the one you can fix. It’s your head!)
This the affirmation we all already know and just need to remind ourselves…What’s that slogan the SPCA coined – A Pet Is A Lifelong Commitment? I had a few friends who were so terrified of getting a dog… and I would be looking at them and thinking But You Would Make Such A Great Owner, How Could You Think You Might Not Be? HOW bad a parent, HOW careless about your child’s education or feeding and care of etc etc could you POSSIBLY be? The people who worry the most are ironically the ones who most likely are doing the best job. (The ones who REALLY are doing a bad job probably have no freaking idea or don’t give a rat’s @ss.) So what’s left? Being a good parent who instead sells themselves short and then ironically that’s what makes them less good at it because they allow themselves to be manipulated? Mind blown.
I had a PE teacher back in Junior College (so I was about 17yrs old) who just hated me once introduced the Fosbury Flop used in High Jump in a lesson. I don’t think any of us had ever done this thing:
Fosbury Flop diagram from carloselopez.com about Change Management – he says Dick Fosbury took 5 years to get good at it but it ultimately improved high jump records by a substantial 10 cm
You run at the bar and then instead of straddling it to jump over like any “normal” kids’ Jump Rope game, you go over the thing back first. That’s not the bit that stuck, what stuck was when she said she she could tell how we felt about ourselves, our “belief in ourselves” based on how we ran up to the bar. “Some of you were not going to make it before it was ever your turn at the bar. Why?”
(In case you’re wondering, she pretty much hated me from an initial impression formed by my first attempt at the then-NAPFA – National Physical Fitness Assessment – of public Singapore school PE classes. You have to pass a battery of physical fitness tests that includes pull-ups, jumps, sit-ups (for the boys who are about to go to National Service it further determined whether you got slapped an extra few months in dreaded Basic Military Training, I think it was) that included a 2.4km run under a particular time limit… and I had NO IDEA “PE” was anything other than games and coordination, which led to her then-conclusion when I held the entire (Singaporean) class up during our first run up a hill, “Oh, you’re a Malaysian. NO WONDER.” 😀 (As in, because they most commonly had Malaysians joining their Singaporean public schools since the two countries are right next to each other, and then we often have problems with some NAPFA item or other because we were obviously not growing up with NAPFA-based PE lessons..) Sorry Malaysia, running for me is like pulling teeth. BUT we found redemption in Fosbury!)
That was also the year I asked myself what I liked most about the people I respected and wanted to be around. And what I didn’t, about others. Then I started practicing being who I wanted to be.
Have a wonderful 2019, dears.
