Over the last couple chapters or all of them, the idea of self comparisons with others has repeatedly poked it’s head into the discussion. At one or more points, the idea of our egos being to blame has also been suggested.
Not to suggest an overly simplistic question that I’m sure all of you have a correct answer to, but, what does that really mean? And why is that bad? And why have i just turned one question into three?
It’s a compulsion. Sorry.
Let me ask a different question. Is there a difference between having an identity and being completely self focused? Or, how about this one. Is there a difference between personal growth and maturity, and having to be better and win and all cost?
When the questions are asked like that, the answer seems obvious. But when the question hasn’t been specifically delineated and we are left to assess our own life without the question and answer check list, it can get pretty muddy.
And muddy is icky. I really don’t like mud. I know it’s only wet dirt. But dry dirt brushes off relatively easy. Wet dirt sticks and stains and gets in the cracks of everything. It’s slippery and dangerous even. Mud is only funny when someone who isn’t me slips and falls into it face first. It’s never funny when I fall on my face, no matter how much everyone else maybe laughing.
This is because falling hurts. So said Commander Obvious. Remember when you were a kid and you would fall in the grass playing tag or football or whatever other things we did in the grass? There was this window in our age range somewhere between 8 and 18 where falling down didn’t really hurt that bad. We might get a small bruise or a scrape, but otherwise we pretty much got right back up and continued doing whatever we were doing with joy and glee.
But before and after that, it was a big deal. Before the age of 8ish, we would hit the ground and cry like a baby. After the teenage years, we would hit the ground and pretend like it didn’t hurt like, something… painful and hurty (shut-up, i’m not an english major.) But during that golden range of resilience, we had to do something pretty stupid before we really suffered for it and it almost always had something to do with trying upstage someone else in some macho alpha dog beat our chests as we hurdle the fence in my neighbor’s back yard and caught my shoe lace on the way over but managed to catch myself with my liver. Or, you know, something else like that which didn’t happen to me when I was 10 or so.
It’s always funny to everyone else. And it’s always funny when it’s someone else. But when I land on my face, it’s never funny to me.
By the way, have you ever actually done that? Landed relatively squarely on your face?
When I was roughly somethingteen years old, me and two other friends who’s names will remain unspoken conspired to build two of the gnarliest(it was the end of the 80’s, beginning of the 90’s... we said stupid words like that. You are lucky I didn’t say they were “rad”.) launch ramps for jumping our bikes and skateboards that had ever been conceived of by pubescent testosterone sacks with more bravado than brains. I mean, it’s what you do when you out grow planks of wood set at angle on fireplace logs for the sake of launching ones bicycle into the stratosphere.
After collecting all the rickety and half rotted wood we could find, we shed some skin and collected some splinters as our feat of engineering came together. When all was said and done, we had built two almost quarter-pipe launch ramps that stood around four and half feet high at the point of full take off.
We were the envy of our block. All the “ladies” loved us. The little kids wanted to be us. And why not? We were “manly men” and all that. Daredevils of awesome awesomeness.
But we weren’t stupid(he barely said with a straight face.) We started off slow. We put them back to back for “safety” purposes. This way, we could start off by riding up one and across the top of both and then down the other side. Eventually one of us, I honestly don’t remember who, managed to actually get some air. He made it almost across the flat space in between the two ramps before landing.
He almost crashed, but saved it at the last second. Which was good, not because he didn’t die, but because we had learned something. When you land on a steep landing ramp, you must come down nose first or else the bike will just flip out from under you as you try to ride the back tire down the ramp.
This was new to us. Previously we had done all our jumping on to flat surfaces which require you to either land level or slightly on the back tire to keep from crashing through the handle bars and into the pavement in some spectacularly crunchy fashion.
So, armed with this new information, the next guy did the same thing, except a little faster. But instead of a shaky landing, he nosed over as he came down and completed a beautiful rockstar landing.
Well, now we were all stoked. We had seen it with our own eyes. It could be done. Soon, all three of us were jumping from one ramp to the other with the grace and ease of ballerinas. In fact, we got so good at it, we started to get a little bored. Which is when one of us decided we should put some space between the ramps. Not a lot, just a little to make the distance greater.
That almost ended badly. We didn’t know how much faster to go for sure, and with space in between, you didn’t want to come up short. Which is exactly what the first guy did. Fortunately, again, he didn’t crash. But he did have to step off when he landed on top and caught one tire in the gap.
But no harm, no foul. We simply just solved the issue. We found a piece of plywood to put across the gap. From there, we just kept at it till we had mastered that distance. At which point we would widen the distance between ramps and do it again.
We continued to do this until we had put the length of a full sheet of plywood (read: eight feet) between the two ramps. This does not include the distance of the top of each ramp which was a couple feet each. That piece of plywood was just barely crossing the gap.
Did that phase us? Not even a little. At this point we had learned to judge the speed and distance and were launching ourselves into the sky with such skill that even Evil Knievel would have been proud.
At this point you might be asking yourself, “So... where were their parents during all this stupidity?”
My answer is “Yes. Yes...”
Back to the story. Because our skill had become so great we started going faster and faster with the intention of going higher and higher. And it was working. Every time one of us would go, the next one would start farther away to get more speed before hitting the ramp and attaining higher altitudes than previously thought possibly. But more importantly, higher altitudes than the friend who had gone before us.
Now, it was no longer about beating the ramp. It was about beating the other guy. We had to be the one who did the jump that the other guys couldn’t beat.
Historically, even though I was the tallest of this group of friends, I wasn’t necessarily the fastest or most daredevilish. But I had decided that this time, I wasn’t going to blink first. I was going to keep pushing till they backed off.
Why I decided that starting toward the ramp from three houses away was a good idea I will never know. One detail that we had all over looked was that, in our quest to attain higher jumps, we were also attaining greater distances. You can’t do one without doing the other. But because our gains had been so small and we were still landing safely on the landing ramp, we hadn’t noticed the gains had been there.
Fortunately I figured it out.
Unfortunately I didn’t figure it out till I was already in the air.
I hit that ramp at near lights-peed. That’s the speed you can attain from three whole houses away. Everyone knows this. It’s scientific bicycle fact. And at such speed, time weirdness and relativity goodies occur. For example, while in the air at such great height and speed, I had time to look around, smile at the small crowd of local onlookers, pose for the nonexistent camera’s, consider whether the cute girl was going to want to go out behind the bushes with me because I was now going to be super awesome, and I even had time to consider what might transpire there should she make the suggestion.
It was at that moment I decided it must be time to land. Nosing the bike over into proper landing position, I was struck by the fact that the landing ramp looked awfully flat suddenly. Then I was struck by the fact that I wasn’t looking at the landing ramp and instead was looking at the pavement past the landing ramp as my relativistic speeds had propelled me well beyond the entire ramp.
If I hadn’t already nosed over, I might have pulled it off. Maybe. Instead, I hit the ground nose first with force of a tactical nuke.
My front rim bent in half to something that resembled a hard taco shell.
My front forks crack and bent at expensive angles.
My gooseneck, the thing that holds the handle bars to the stearing hub, snapped clean off as my body plowed through the handle bars and into the not-nearly-as-soft-as-it-looks concrete.
The handle bars themselves, however, were completely unscathed, so, that was nice.
I, on the other hand, was much less unscathed. You see, as I pointed out, this was right around the turn of the 80’s into the 90’s. This meant that safety gear included a tank top, shortish shorts, and no helmet. I don’t even think I had socks on.
After my bicycle exploded into it’s various components, as I said, I continued right on into the pavement, and then after bouncing a couple times, continued to slide the entire distance of a two car driveway width. I know this because I had such a great vantage point of where I was about to land, before I landed, and I remember very clearly, unfortunately, the entire tumble and slide and noted very specifically where I finally was able to pull myself to my feet.
There was a lot of skin missing on one side of my body. Fortunately it was contained to the space between the top of my head and my feet. Right leg, right arm, bits of my face and head, all nicely rashed. Palms nicely raw, right knee very open and bleeding.
After I realized I wasn’t dead, I dragged myself to my feet, saw the carnage of my bike, then started feeling the carnage to my body, and did what any other self respecting teenage man-boy would do.
I cried all the way home. Which, fortunately, was just across the street.
Amazingly, nothing was broken. In fact, I don’t even have any scars from it. If I hadn’t somehow managed to roll as I grenaded the earth I’d probably be dead from head trauma.
I had huge scabbing scars for weeks, though. But not on my face, thank goodness. I was much to pretty to handle that well.
I had no bike. So I couldn’t jump anymore till I put one back together from a borrowed frame and left over parts.
But you know what? I was totally fine with that because I had done it. I had beat them both. No one out did that jump. It doesn’t matter that I hadn’t landed it. I had done it. I wasn’t embarrassed about biting it so hard. I was hardcore and had just poked the bear and walked away from it.
At least, that’s how I felt till I finally had a bike again. I went back to the ramp, rode up at approach speed, and panicked. I tried again and panicked again. The best I was ever able to manage was to simply ride over the top of it.
I couldn’t do it. I had lost my nerve. I was scared to death.
That’s when the embarrassment set in. I was out there, in front of my peers, and I didn’t have the courage to do it anymore. I may have crashed hard when I hit the pavement, but I hadn’t fallen till that very second. That pain hurt worse than any bruise ever had.
My ego wanted me to win. To be the best. To beat them. To show them who the man really was.
My ego wanted to be seen so badly that it caused me to not think at all about the consequences of my actions. It made me feel invincible so that I would keep at it.
The ego wants to survive at all costs. That’s why it has to die before it pushes us into a fall that we can’t ever recover from. It’s the “not recovering” that matters here. If we don’t recover, the fall happens to completion and as we know it’s not the fall that hurts. It’s the sudden impact with the concrete at the bottom that ruins our day.
No comments:
Post a Comment