I went snowboarding the other day for the first time. The experience was a wonderful way to reset the clock in light of the new year, to freshen up my perspective, to shine my glasses clear of any residue that emerges from faithful repetitions of two way hockey agility. I have two takeaways from the experience.
First is the idea of adopting the board as part of my body while first trying to snowboard. My task was adapting the limits of my bodily cognizance to meld with the board extremities and communicate with the mountain slope while obeying gravity. There was an image of snowboarding myself that I was briefly able to attain and carry along in my mind’s eye that enhanced my beginning skill. But this image only emerged after I disconnected my eyes from my environment, elsewhere seen as softened eyes, and became cognizant of my feet, my arms, my hips, my head, and the board by way of feeling my orientation and sensing the direction I was heading.
This is why hockey is deranged,
The inner sense of the image (better illustrated by Bernstein’s theories) combined with body feeling in time and space aligned with individual goals is perverted in favor of pleasing the coach, fitting into the group formation, absolving individual player responsibility and neutering player decision making by deferring to this impoverished vision.
Being a ‘hockey guy’— or ‘knowing the game’ as people in the higher echelons of the sport like to say while they draw a line in the sand between those uninitiated to the game’s ways thereby preying on outsider confusion and aligning themselves with the other hockey company men who also refuse to accept a proper hockey orientation in favor of manufacturing known gameplay patterns so the game can be corralled and ordered to their liking, control and domination while stifling new variation and cooperation— means you will not accept change, beauty and real self mastery in the game. Actually playing the game is lost.
The second idea I took away from beginning snowboarding was my resistance to the flow experience. I could get up on the board and start going straight down the mountain but my insufficient knowledge for how to navigate the mountain slope carrying a significant amount of momentum led me to bailing on the simple feeling every time. The feeling of flow— weightlessness, frictionless procession— that accelerator when stepped on is terrifying until you gain some command over turning and stopping. Smushkin gave me the knowledge of the accelerator while being unafraid in the pursuit of its gifts and cognizant of the inevitable friction on the way to flow. A grounding in this process as opposed to external direction/reward inevitably leads to the intrinsic motivation inside two way hockey agility’s friction and flow.
Thanks for reading.