Ski touring.
This is why we live here, I remind myself. In my excitement, I started up too quickly and my breath was racing. Probably my heartbeat, too. Slow down, enjoy this, I told myself. Despite stubborn temps at home that hovered just above freezing, a ten-minute drive found me in the throes of winter. I parked, walked across the road and tossed my skis on the fresh, untracked snow. Clicked in my boots and started skinning uphill.
Being able to hop in a car and drive ten minutes before clicking into my skis and going for a ski tour. That's why we live here. It's not epic. Whatever. I just love the act of going uphill on skis, and sliding downhill. But mostly the uphill part. Because it's not epic, I have the place to myself. Not a soul, not a sound. Except my breathing, and my skis sliding ahead of me before crunching down on the soft snow.
I let my mind wander, as only I'm able to do when I'm breathing hard outside. I thought about last year, and this year. What I had accomplished, what I had learned. Like David Helfgott's piano professor told him, wisely, 'Once you've done it, no one can ever take it away from you.' He was referring to Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor. I use it when referring to learning stuff. I learned a lot last year that, regardless of where the future takes me, takes us, no one can ever take it away.
Little did I know, that particular morning while I silently skied uphill alone, a piercing mob of thousands of angry people who had been deceived, felt it their calling to storm our nation's capitol. The dissonance wasn't lost on me. Nor the idea of my quiet, ordinary life versus that of those who felt, if only they shouted loud enough that day, somehow they would get their way. That the lies they had been told would become truth. Here was my satisfaction in the simplicity of just moving, of breathing. Of silence, all while snow flakes fell in stillness around me. My fingers finally getting warm enough to take off my gloves.
At the top, before I transitioned my skis from uphill mode to downhill, I sat in the snow. Still unbeknownst to me, all the rage and the entitlement, the deception. I was lost in my own thoughts. Why I was doing what I was doing, what I was doing, how I was doing it. It felt good to me. I was at peace, with myself and my place in this moment. Unlike those in Washington, D.C. Yes, they had been betrayed. From their betrayal, rather than rage, what could they learn that no one could ever take away from them?
It was time to glide downhill. What took me a little over thirty minutes to skin uphill took a little over five down. No one heard my childish, giddy squeals. I'd get home fifteen minutes after that, a morning well-spent. Rather than running, I went skiing for my morning workout. It would take time to process the news, to make sense of the cacophony. All the while and still now, I remember the stillness and the solitude, and remind myself again: that's why we live here.
