An Adolescent’s Struggle to Reality
I have only just awakened from my childhood dream, and most of the time I want to fall back asleep. I would love to look down from the top of the mountain at everything below me, and to see everything I’ve overcome in fine detail. Many of the struggles and obstacles I have experienced through ski racing relate to the topics discussed in the readings about man’s journeys.
I was born a dare devil, and it only seemed right to channel my high levels of energy into a sport such as ski racing. From the beginning of my skiing career I had to be the best. By age five I was tucking down hills on roller blades, flipping my bike off the dock into the lake, and playing on an all boys soccer team. I felt invincible, and I wasn’t going to let anyone stand in the way of reaching the top of my mountain - not even myself.
Shortly after my nineteenth birthday I was invited onto the Western Region Ski Team, a development team for the United States Olympic Team. I felt like all my hard work was finally coming full circle, but I was risking my life each time I pushed out of the start gate onto perilous downhill courses. Skiing was an obsession that I could not live without. I was addicted to the adrenaline that pumped though my veins, and wrapped in a dream world full of parties, traveling, and exciting people. Some athletes never have to escape this surreal lifestyle. I was not one of them. Last February I underwent my third knee surgery which marked the end of my life as a ski racer. It also seemed to me like the end of my identity. All of my previous injuries felt like flaws I had to overcome and destroy. I never backed down and foolishly disregarded broken collar bones, ribs, concussions, herniated discs, and concerned warnings from my peers.
I would give anything to return to a place where I feel safe, untouchable, and complete again. Author Wallace Stevens described this place as one where he would, “be complete in an unexplained completion, the exact rock where his inexactness would discover at last the view toward which they had edged, where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, recognize his unique solitary home.” Ski racing has given me a great mentality for my future because it is now time for me to start the ascent to some distant peak. I’m going to start the climb lost, confused and scared. These emotions are all part of the excitement for me because without them life would be planned, boring, and gray. The most important aspect I’ve learned thus far is to think myself invincible because to children, men and women the world is home to all possibilities.
Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer, does an excellent job in portraying a vivid image of the man’s soul flight to discover reality. It seems like Borges liked to write about events that take place in the night. In the poem, The Break of day, he is trying to capture the fear, blackness, and dreams that take place when the world falls asleep. The Circular Ruins is a story rather than a poem but still revolves around a man’s dream and in fact that the man is a dream within a dream. The connection between the Circular Ruins and Wallace Steven’s poem, The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, can be determined in greater detail. They both provide the reader with an adventure as well as a description of a man’s struggle to find his self. With my childhood dreams dashed I too am struggling, and ride myself of the nightmares of lost identities. The mountain once again in these readings is being used as a symbol of obtaining a goal and reaching a peak of accomplishment. Stevens described the summit as a place to relax and just feel at home. In a way this place of solitude is more than a dream than reality. The same as how skiing was captivating me in every moment of my existence causing me to ignore the fact that at one point I needed to come back down to earth and grow up. Borges wrote that, a “man’s victory, and peace, were dulled by the wearisome sameness of his days.” I think that you can compare this thought to the whole reason behind Steven’s poem. Stevens wrote The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain because he lived a corporate lifestyle and needed to escape the everyday routine that he was stuck in. Most people imagine and create exciting circumstances because as humans we are always evolving and in search of something better that what we are doing at the exact moment.
I admire people who put themselves in an uncomfortable position of independence and solitude with hopes of discovering their soul flight. It is terrifying for an individual to embark on a new path of existence when they have grown accustomed to a specific way of life. In the Circular Ruins Borges writes, “Gradually, the man accustomed the youth to reality. Once he ordered him to set a flag on a distant mountaintop. The next day, the flag crackled at the summit. He attempted other, similar experiments –each one more daring than the last. He saw with some bitterness that his son was ready –perhaps even impatient-to be born.” As a child we set such high goals and don’t understand the numerous smaller goals that are essential to reach the final result. We desire what we yearn for at that precise moment and have no tolerance for the time it takes in order to succeed. This is why adolescents are constantly forging new paths throughout their years. I travel back a year in time and recognize how scared I was when my whole world came crashing down around me. Skiing was all I had ever known and I had dedicated the first twenty years of my life to the sport. It took me months of tears and physical therapy to conclude that my injury was a blessing in disguise – a clean break from my past. Borges described a new start perfectly in his poem, Break of Day. He writes, “But again the world has been spared. Light roams the streets inventing dirty colors and with a certain remorse for my complicity in the day’s rebirth I ask my house to exist, amazed and icy in the white light, as one bird halts the silence and the spent night stays on in the eyes of the blind.” Now I’m starting a new chapter in my life and at times I catch my self smirking with excitement of my unknown future. Being young is about taking chances, making mistakes, and discovering who you want to be. We are all no different from one another because it is crucial as an adolescent to think you are invincible.
