Everyday is a perfect day
Johan asks himself, trying to make out what comes after the next drop. Make out, since apparently a cloud has gobbled up the entire Titlis. Actually, all of the mountains of Central Switzerland. I wonder if Engelberg is still there, at the bottom of the valley.
Johan sniggers, breathing ice cold and opaque air, thick with humidity. If you have grown up in Sweden and you love to ski, well, you can't afford to be fussy with the conditions. Even less so if skiing is your life. You can't see anything. You can't feel anything, as if the snow and clouds have eaten up every sound. The horizon, the line dividing snow and sky is only a theory, a vague suggestion. Yet Johan wishes to be nowhere else now.
“Go wherever you wish when it is perfect. Take what you want when it is perfect. What brash lie"
Johan mumbles getting ready for the jump. Because, surprise, perfection does not exist.
Because conditions are not important. On the contrary, they are part of a story.
Of your story, of your past, of what has brought you to be who you are and where you are, or the story you will tell during the evening, happy and exhausted at the end of a day during which the rest of the world has stopped at the window waiting, getting bored, waiting for perfection.
Wabi-sabi, that's what the Japanese say.
Two simple words for a complex truth nothing lasts, nothing is over, nothing is perfect, and that is what makes the universe beautiful. But there is something that belongs to us: the possibility of accepting our fragility or the conditions for what they are, not for what we want them to be. The moment belongs to us, the ability to stay centered, pick our line and go, steady and in control.
Because no matter what you are, freerider or ski-mountaineer, if your objective is to quickly ski through the gates or explore your home mountains. It doesn't matter if the sky is painfully blue or you can't tell the ground from the sky.
What matters is skiing.
Johan's skis lose contact with the snow. He checks the position of his body with feline like balance, getting ready to control his landing.
We don't need to feel the snow scrape under our edges to discover who we are.
