What follows comes from the same zero draft as the piece I published last Monday. I cut this part because that piece was already overlong, and because this part felt unwieldy to include. But I kept thinking this was actually the most important stuff that I wrote, so I decided it deserved a piece all its own.
I recently had a ski day at Breckenridge with my friend Andy. After a warm-up on Peak 8, and some icy cruisers and so-so bumps on Peak 10, we took a snack/water break and discussed where to go next. Perhaps we'd find good snow on Breck's high-alpine terrain? Worth a shot, we decided. So after one more run on Peak 10, we hopped on the SuperConnect and started heading up.
On the ride up the SuperConnect, I checked in with myself and noticed that I hadn't actually been having much fun. Initially, I tried to explain the recognition away: the coverage was just so-so, a lot of the runs were icy, I wasn't skiing my best. Plenty of good reasons to not be having fun.
Except on reflection that looked like bullshit. I was on a beautiful mountain on a beautiful winter day. I had skis on my feet. I was out there with a good friend. If I wasn't having fun because of the conditions, then I should have said to Andy, "Hey, let's go do something else." But I didn't want to leave. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
So as we rode the SuperConnect, I turned my mind to something I've been exploring a lot this winter. I spent many years, most of my adult life, in a moderate anhedonic depression. Even after my studies in flow presented me with a path out of that depression, I remained unhappy about many aspects of my life. Over the course of all those depressed and unhappy years, I had habituated to being an unhappy person. I frequently experienced my life without much pleasure, felt disconnected from the world around me, tended to isolate myself, and expected (and thereby created) negative outcomes. All of this, you have to understand, happened pretty much invisibly. These were habits, and thus essentially unconscious. That the situations that initially brought about these habits no longer obtained was not nearly enough to change them.
So I asked myself: Was my mood the result of the so-so conditions on the mountain that day? Was it simply that I wasn't skiing very well, and was therefore disappointed with myself? In asking these questions, it struck me that the last time I was on Peak 10, and the last time I'd gone up to the high-alpine terrain of Peak 8, it was almost certainly around this time last winter, almost exactly a year ago, during which time I was in fierce debate with myself about my future and the future of my marriage. Could the path of growth and change I was finding myself on co-exist with the person I had grown to be within the marriage? Our respective desires for the lives we wanted to live no longer seemed to move in parallel. While just asking yourself about a significant change in your life can be a step on the growth path and be therefore positive, these were sad questions, and so this time a year ago was a deeply sad time in a life that had, in general, been quite sad.
As I looked into it, it seemed highly likely that my experience on the mountain reflected habitual emotional energy far more than anything actually related to the specific conditions I was experiencing that day. And if that was correct, then the right choice was pretty simple: to try to change the energy within my body by getting very in-tune with the present moment.
I took some deep centered breaths and opened my eyes to what was actually in front of me, and suddenly as if by magic the day got vastly more beautiful. I became aware of the myriad shades of green of the trees along the lift-line cut, and the particular topography of the treetops as seen from the tree-top height of the lift chair, and for a few moments things got almost psychedelic as my perceptions made the transition into this new energy. I felt deeply connected to all that surrounded me, the earth and the terrain and the snow and the light. I had to hook my arm around the back of the chair, because I found myself right on the border of being dizzy.
From the top of the SuperConnect, we dropped down to ride 6 Chair, and a few minutes later at the top of 6 Chair it was time to ski again, and my skiing--and my mood--improved right away. Over the course of three runs off 6 Chair, I made some of the best turns on steep bumps I've ever achieved, and my runs through the flatter run-out back to 6 Chair, the run known as Boneyard, were fun and joyful.
After a break for lunch, we went over to Peak 6, where I could test my hypothesis about my experience that day reflecting habitual sadness from my past. I skied Peak 6 a lot last season, including during the late season when I'd made the difficult decision that the best path forward was to move on with my life, and I'd had a handful of really truly joyful days over there. Sure enough, the feeling on Peak 6 was totally different. Fun and pleasure seemed to inhere in the terrain itself, with no real effort or focus from me.
It's been rare during this winter's exploration of these habits that something has come up as starkly as it did on the mountain, and that I could bring myself into the present so quickly. Nothing seems particularly out of line when I'm making dinner and my mind wanders--it's not nearly as stark as noticing that I'm not having fun while skiing. But it's at least as insidious and as corrosive. So much of life is just … life. It's taking showers and doing the laundry and keeping up with my writing, and if I am engaging in habits of disassociating myself from these moments, if I am in essence refusing to notice the inherent beauty in just being alive, I am quietly missing most of what being alive has to offer. I can't say that I have vanquished these old habits, but on days like what I just described, when I can bring myself forcefully and intentionally into the present, I get a little better at it. It may be no exaggeration to say that this is the most important work I'm doing in my life right now.