Today was a day of triumph. Not in business, not in marketing, not even in parenting.
It was a day of triumph on skis.
I started skiing when I was 7 years old. My dad taught me. He later became an accomplished ski instructor but this was long before that. He wasn't that much of a teacher and I wasn't that much of a student.
I skied as a kid and teen for about a week every other year. Israel doesn't get a lot of snow so we travelled to Europe: Italy, France, Germany. I liked it some of the time, hated it the rest. I could never quite get it, never quite felt in control. But it was a way for me to share something deep with my father (and to a lesser extent, mother) and I stuck with it.
I dropped it when I was 20. Didn't seem worth it.
15 years later I moved with my own family to Canada and we settled in a small ski town, 20 minutes away from a fabulous ski resort. Fabulous by local standards that is - copious amounts of snow, very few groomed runs and an insane amount of terrain, trees and cliffs - all skiable.
Not with my skiing skills though.
It's been 8 years. 8 years of pain, 8 years of lessons, 8 years of going up to the hill and coming back exhausted, defeated, deflated.
Some days were good, but most weren't. My legs hurt, my feet hurt, my heart hurt. I tried to let it go multiple times, even skipped a whole year. But the slopes kept calling me back. And my dad's voice in my head, instructing me on proper technique, kept urging me to do better.
He told me once that to get into ski instructors school you needed to show you could ski in perfect control under all conditions. I was always very far from that ideal. I was always losing control and finding it again, losing and finding - fighting to stay on my feet, fighting fear, fighting pain, fighting exhaustion.
Other people around me were having fun, hollering, laughing. I was fighting, sometimes through tears.
But today, I finally got it.
The conditions were miserable. The first snow storm in a while had frozen the soggy slopes into ice, and heavy snow and fog turned the air into milk. Visibility was near zero. Under my feet were icy moguls scraped bare and covered with a dusting of fresh snow that did nothing to hold the dull edges of my skis.
And yet, I was in absolute control.
For the first time in 35 years of skiing, I knew what I was doing, and my body responded with grace. I read the terrain, I caught each mogul at just the right angle, and I floated.
I laughed.
It was magnificent.
Skiing isn't something I intended to devote my life to conquering. Business is. But having finally grasped this complex mental and physical dance, I believe I can achieve anything.
Thanks dad. 🙏♥️
יא איזה מרגשי.... מהמם... כמה נחישות יש בך יאללה.. דמעות עשית לי דמעות