This post is called Why you have to be an optimist if you skate but it just boils down to three words “one more try”.
Skating has everything you ever want in a movie style life; it’s got action (obviously), drama and comedy with the homies, romance with poetry in motion, horror with injuries and gore and of course the thrill of sneaking into places to film something. I could say Skateboarding has brought me to this point in my life mostly because of going with the flow but the truth is Skateboarding pushed me to stop being a dead fish and start being a proper salmon and galvanized me to my current path. I hear similar stories from lot of people about how if it wasn’t for Skateboarding they might as well have been dead in the water.
I was a born idealist who maybe slowly got jaded and leaned toward cynicism but there is always this thing in the back of my mind which just says persevere and everything will be just fine and life will go on. This made me realise how optimistic you have to be as a skateboarder. You have to believe you are going to come out just fine every time you go for a gap or hand rail or try a new trick with high possibilities of a distasteful sacking. If you don’t truly believe it you cannot possibly commit to the landing. All the calculations of speed, trajectory and angles go out the window the moment you take the leap. All you can think about is “this is going to be just fine right…..right?” cause you aren’t a rocket scientist and you cant be sure of your calculations or your physical ability to actually execute the plan. But you go for it anyway and the thought “I will come out of this fine” becomes your armour. Playing mind games with your self before trying something scary is just optimism, winning over your mental need for self preservation. Another example of skater optimism is that they always believe the next attempt is the one they will most definitely land. After two hundred attempts, failures , injuries and multiple trips to a spot a skater would still say “one more try” with utmost confidence of landing something they failed at spectacularly and continuously. Well that’s my opinion anyway and I maybe wrong. The day you lose your optimism is the day you stop giving “it” another go and you might as well be a dead fish. And as Pennywise the clown said “we all float down here”. I say no we all skate down here and will shred till we can’t shred no more.
