Something I learned in graduate school is that the most interesting people I’ve encountered in life are usually not the ones who race efficiently from Point A to Point B with no stops or detours. So, I will try to think of today as an opportunity to become a more interesting skater, since today was my first Official Testing Fail. One of my big goals for this year was to pass all my Pre-Bronze ice dance tests. I had already done the first (easiest) one, the Cha Cha in fall 2017. Today was the big day when I would test the other two — the Swing Dance and the Fiesta Tango. The good news is that I passed the Fiesta Tango; the bad news is that the Swing Dance and I have some more ground to cover together.
It’s a little ironic because the dance that I passed is the one that intimidated me more. It has a quick Mohawk turn going into the end pattern that I’ve been working on for months, among other tricky elements. Today, though, the thing that got me more than anything else was nerves, and it really showed in my first dance, when I didn’t keep time well with my partner (my ever-patient coach Russ), and generally skated the whole pattern in a way that the judges accurately referred to as “sluggish”.
There’s a Buddhist bit of wisdom that can be reasonably paraphrased to the effect that life’s lessons keep showing up till we learn them. So for today, I’ll post the video of the one that came together for me here:
And here’s the one that will help me become a better person (and better skater) as I work on the lessons of gratitude for challenges — along with better timing and backward swing rolls:
Not what I’d hoped to be recording today, but my goal for this blog is to record it all — the good and the bad, in the hopes of capturing what it’s like to try to improve on a skill taken up later in life. Hopefully this post will help me remember that what doesn’t feel good at the time might make me improve in the long run.
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