The one with the empty ice rink

Yesterday John and I arrived at the ice rink to find very few cars parked out front.  SCORE!  We’ll have the entire rink to ourselves, we said almost in unison.  Grand illusions of skating backwards, practicing two foot turns without worry of falling on someone and enjoying the peace and quite of a slightly chilled ice rink with only a few other skaters danced through our heads.  We quickly walked up to the front door, scampered up to the entrance window to get our passes initialed and then saw the mass of young children skating counterclockwise around the rink.

We figured it was best to try and made some lemonade out of the situation and at least skate for a few minutes.  After all, any time on the ice is good time, I think.  At least I can work on just skating forward and gliding on one foot.  So we walked over to the skate counter and of course, my favorite pair of skates were gone.  Oh well.  What can you do when you don’t own your own skates?  ”I’ll take pair 9F.”Needless to say, about half an hour into our practice I started to lose interest.  I couldn’t really practice anything I had learned because I felt I needed to be on constant lookout for a young child who might suddenly dart in front of me.  And then it happened.  Out of nowhere, every single child left the rink and there we stood, all by ourselves, on a completely empty sheet of ice!

As we skated and twirled and fell (just a little) I realized two things.  One, society is dead wrong when they imply or flat out say that you need to be successful (i.e. have a lot of money) to experience the best things in life and/or have things no one gets.  Two, I need to approach every event in my life like an empty ice rink.

First, I grew up thinking that “as soon as I have just one million dollars tucked away I’ll be able to do those things in life everyone dreams of and not have to worry about earning an income.”  One million dollars was just a wag.  I didn’t really know how much money I’d have to have sitting around to generate enough interest to fund my monthly desires without touching the principal.  I just knew I needed a rather large nest egg and THEN I could wake up each morning and decide whether it was a volunteer-at-the-dog-shelter kind of day or a go-visit-my-best-friend kind of day.  Slowly, over the course of the years, I started to realize that the only possession I really wanted in life was a good story.  I wanted a good set of experiences that when pieced together could be looked back on with a smile.  On my deathbed I don’t think I’ll care if I have a bazillion dollars in savings but I do know I’ll feel disappointed if I look back and all I can remember are the walls of my office.  So, a true and dedicated effort to find interesting experiences began about 4 years ago and yesterday an empty ice rink reminded me of the fallacy society convinced me of so many years ago.  You DON’T need money to have the best things in life and/or have things no one else gets.  You need flexibility.  You need to be able to seek out that isolated ice rink in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon when everyone else is stuck at work.  You need a mindset that propels you day after day to find these buried treasures.  Yes, I’m sure with enough money someone could rent out the ice rink several days a week but for a few pennies John and I found and experienced this lovely little gem of an experience.  You don’t need money, you need flexibility.

My second realization/reminder was that I need to treat every aspect of my life like an empty ice rink.  When the rink is full of people, including a large mass of small children, I’m afraid.  Visions of skating over the finger of a little five year old girl with blond ringlets prevents me from going for it.  I’m afraid to skate a little bit faster or practice my turns because I might fall on a child or create a pileup of falling people with knife blades on their feet.  However, when the rink was free and empty I slowly and surely built up a level of confidence and let go of my fear.  I made more progress yesterday in an hour and fifteen minutes than I’ve made since day one, I think.  John and I skated up and down and diagonally and even … gasp … skated clockwise around the rink.  I skated faster than normal.  I practiced skating backward and even had John teach me a new technique.  I did my two foot turns with confidence because if I fell, I fell.  No big deal.  After I let go of my fear I made immense progress and had so much fun.  I felt like a child, playing on the ice rink, with a dear friend.  Fear really does tie your hands.

So, here’s to a continued tweaking of our lifestyle with what I hope are realistic and truthful beliefs.   Flexibility and no fear.  That’s my new motto!

This entry was posted on Wed, Jan 26 2011 at 18:22 and is filed under Vanessa's Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.