After some time out with a knee injury, I’m slowly getting back into one of my very favorite activities, rollerblading. At this point, it’s not just my shaky muscles I need to get back into shape, it’s my courage. As is true of many things, rollerblading requires a certain amount of abandon or you just can’t get moving at all. Paradoxically, thinking “I could fall!” makes falling just that much more likely – and the older I get, the more self-preservation seems like a really good idea. I cracked a rib last year and I have busted up the same knee twice. Sometimes I’m tempted to put skating into the category of things I used to do when I was younger.
But I can’t quite give it up yet, and so I was out on the paved greenway this morning, strapping on skates, kneepads, wrist guards and helmet. I tried to distract myself from sheer terror by reveling in the cool shade and the honeysuckle-scented air. And once I got going I amused myself by mentally listing the life lessons a person could learn through rollerblading. “Don’t skate so fast you can’t brake when you need to.” “Always keep a sharp eye on the road ahead.” “When you stumble, lean forward and keep moving and you probably won’t fall.”
Goofy, I know, but it helped. Before long, I was starting to remember why nothing makes me feel as exuberant as skating does. It will be a while before I can do any real distance again, but eventually I got enough fluidity going that I remembered how I used to call Mile Seven of a long skate “the happiest mile.”
When I was regularly skating ten or twelve miles, Mile Seven tended to be the point where I had finally completely shed any awkwardness, inhibition or reluctance to push my body hard. By then, my muscles would be working smoothly, my breathing would be even, and my body would revel in pure movement . My quibbling, caution-spewing brain would quiet down, contentment would reign, and any thoughts that surfaced tended to be happy ones. Sometimes a problem would solve itself in my head, or a new idea would bubble up. And if not, well, who cared? I was enjoying myself.
Maybe extracting Life Lessons from Rollerblading isn’t quite so ridiculous after all. Maybe there’s a happiest mile in the course of a lifetime too, a stretch when early fumblings and doubts are behind you, when everything just goes along as it should without much conscious effort, when there is still pathway ahead and you’re not tired out yet. Maybe I’m in that stretch now or maybe it’s yet to come. I just hope I recognize it so I can enjoy it to the hilt.
