Skateboarding and I…
Three Sixty Flip to Switch Nine Hundred Fakie Revert
For the first couple years there’s no escaping it, you’re gonna suck. You’ll fall down a lot, you’ll get hurt all the time, and you’ll realize you’ve got no chance in hell of ever being good at skateboarding.
And it’s here, if you’re smart, that you’ll give up. Start wearing some skate shoes and dressing the part, but quit actually going the park and rolling around. Find a couple friends and play video games and talk about skateboarding instead.
Okay, maybe you’re a bit of an idiot, and you don’t quit for the first couple years. You stick it out and make it into your third or fourth year of falling down and looking like an ass. You’ve done a million kickflips and yet you still can’t land one out of three tries.
By now there’s no chance in hell of anyone ever caring how good you aren’t at skateboarding. But still you’re obsessed.
For what purpose? To be cool? After a few years that shit just disappears. You’re just an old dude who still hangs on to a kid’s toy.
And so as you get older, skateboarding becomes less and less about what tricks you land, and more about what skateboarding does to your head. It clears ideas out, settles them in their places. It becomes a kind of meditation, but not the safe kind, where you sit cross legged. Instead, there are direct physical consequences for the loss of attention.
And the connection between your focus and the rest of your life gets caught into this sphere of skating. It only makes you more capable, to eliminate everything and focus only on immediate needs.
