In the business world and any space where people talk about success, they say that in order to be successful or be worth anything, “You have to be able to move mountains.”
Snowboarding is a difficult sport to learn, but once you have it, it’s fairly easy to master. Confidence and trust is huge when flying down a mountainside. Control is important in snowboarding just as it is in anything. However, it has to be the right amount of control. Not too little, not too much.
When doing forms in martial arts, it’s completely possible that one can perform his form too tensely and thereby, fail to flow. So is it with snowboarding. The moment you start tensing up and distrusting your abilities and lose confidence in your movement is the moment you will freeze up and fall.
So often, we are pressed with the need to have complete control and disallow ourselves to flow. I mention it before in another post, “Keep Calm and Mushin On…”, this idea of “no mind”. Snowboarding down a mountain is about moving with the mountain, not against it. Letting the snow move you and trusting yourself to flow with it is how it’s done. The moment you try to move the mountain to you is when you begin to become uncertain of your movements, tense up, then fall.
Same is the case sometimes with life. Every now and then, instead of trying to move the mountain, move with it. Bruce Lee once said, “Be like water, my friend.” Instead of always striving for strength and force, seek flow.
In Between Degrees 