Based on a previous post, I decided to revamp it a little bit in preparation for a school assignment. The following came out of it. Still pretty horrible, but it's an effort:
I was at work the first week of my junior year of college, in the school’s ITS department, and I had to fix a media cart that was having issues in a classroom. The room’s vacancy was scarce, and a German class soon began session in my presence. The funny thing is, I probably learned more in that class during those five minutes than I learned that entire week. I learned how to say all of the months in German, and also learned that little kids are more apt to become fluent in several languages because the muscles in the human mouth grow in age to accommodate the language they speak. Thus, adults have a harder time learning different languages, whilst children can become masterful powerhouses of language fluency.
Little kids have power. This is especially apparent with the thing I love doing most: skateboarding. I started skateboarding when I was in high school, and I often wonder what I would have turned out like if I started earlier, like most kids these days, around elementary school. As I get older, the skill difference between me and younger skateboarders seems to get more and more tangible as the age difference widens. Little kids nearly the same size as the skateboard are able to pull off tricks I was just learning in the tenth or eleventh grade of high school.
And, sooner than I’d hope, much sooner than the rest of these kids, I will probably start to break down in time. I will feel the grenades of age ease into my spinal sockets and casually explode, shredding and fragmenting the discs in my back. I have far fetched visions of myself as an eighty year-old man carving a bowl or pulling off switch 360 flips, but really, I understand that inevitably, I will have to stop skateboarding for the sake of my own health. I will have to stop learning and teaching myself new tricks and daring myself to go beyond my own physical comforts for the sake of success. I will have to start learning and teaching myself about surviving in my physical body.
I am offered an oddly comforting reassurance though that, despite how early and how fast children seem to advance in skateboarding these days, they will still go through a realization such as mine at some point in their lives too. No matter what skill level they ascend to, all skateboarders will reach the same end result in time. It makes me feel less alone.
I’m not bitter of my own progression in skateboarding, nor am I bitter of the fact that kids are getting better and better at skateboarding at earlier ages. I condone such growth, and am hopeful that, unlike the filthy food corporations and their growth hormones, our youth hone their skateboarding skills out of pure love and nothing else. Skateboarding is more than just a hobby that people can talk about and express interest in. When two people meet while skateboarding, even if they don’t talk to each other, they are speaking to one another through the passion of learning at a unique pace. Each person has their own riding style, their own brands of boards, their own brands of shoes, their favorite tricks, and their favorite skate spots; these elements and many more mesh into a centralized message of love. Even if a person quits skateboarding in their later years and simply reminisces these elements once apparent in their life, they will look back on elements that captivated a sincere love, and will hopefully feel that love festering greater and greater for the skateboarders preceding them, offering zero traces of scorn or abolishment.
Skateboarding indefinably weaves itself into the lifestyle of people. Sometimes it’s a slow growth, and other times it accumulates like a fatal cancer. Skateboarding is a language, and I sincerely believe that those who speak it experience one of the most honest and satisfying methods of learning how to learn.
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