Channeling Chumbawamba

Or, how to be OK with sucking at something...

I was sitting on my couch, doing puzzles when, after a sip of coffee, I let myself feel what I was really feeling: fear. Not abject or paralyzing fear, more of a sort of low-hum vibration of unease I’d felt in my youth, but not in a very long time — and never this noisy.

Setting my phone down, I sat with it a moment. There it was, that was it. I was afraid of falling. Literally falling.

I am a new cross country skier. I fall. A lot. Sunday was my first day solo, and I fell three times: First, trying to stop myself from gliding downhill onto a frozen pond; then when my ski unexpectedly gripped a cluster of dead oak leaves in the track; then, most harrowingly, on a 30-yard curve in the shade of a cottonwood where the course was rock-hard sheet ice, with no ski tracks at all. I made it about 20 yards before falling, which I considered a win.

There’s something about falling that strikes fear in all but the very young. As a middle-aged person, falling can be serious. So willingly putting myself in situations where I am going to fall, causes a part of my brain to rebel. What are you doing?! Stop! Just go to the gym.

But I don’t. I get back up again and again. And I fall less, or at least now in different situations. Last week I couldn’t ski downhill in a track. Now I can. Today I learned how to ski downhill outside the tracks — no small feat in cross country skis. And I am getting better at the “snowplow” stop familiar to downhill skiers, but which, again, is harder on edgeless xc skis.

This isn’t really about skiing. It’s about getting up again. And again. And again. This is about sucking at something, and being OK with it. It’s about being at peace with knowing you will never be great at a thing — Jessie Diggins I’ll never be — but that you may just get good enough to be happy doing it.

My instructor, Tom Shaw, told me today he has no recollection of learning to ski. He’s just… always skied. I have no real recollection of learning to forage or fish. I’ve just always done it.

Hunting is a far different matter. I did not pick up a shotgun until I was 32, and I vividly remember all my misadventures learning how to hunt. But most of those adventures are in my rear view mirror. Not because I don’t hunt, but because in the past 24 years, I’ve gotten good at it. Not better than, say, my friend Larry Robinson, who basically hunts for a living. But good enough for it to feel like second nature.

And even though I have gathered wild, edible plants and mushrooms since I was young, moving here to Minnesota was something of a shock after 20 years in California. Like Tom in skiing, I have had guides. My friends Jamie Rockney, Mike Karns, and Alan Bergo helped me learn local knowledge I would have struggled to acquire solo.

Maybe I am just weird. Or maybe it’s because I was a journalist for 18 years, trained to ask lots and lots of questions, to not hide ignorance, to follow up. Being a good reporter is to learn new things daily, at speed. But then again, my dad wasn’t a journalist, and I’ve never really lived with him, and yet he too started things like painting in his youth, deadlifting and winemaking in middle age, surfing and repairing porcelain in his old age. So many it’s genetic?

But even if my family’s fire to learn is extreme, everyone has it. You have it, even if you think you may not. However, just as the will to win is nothing compared to the will to prepare to win, the fire to learn is nothing if you are not wholly OK with being pretty terrible at something for however it takes to acquire competency.

So many people I know fear this. “Oh, this is just how I hunt.” Or fish, or whatever. And sure, that method works well for them. But toss that person into an alien environment, where they no longer shoot so well, or know how to set the hook or finesse the fish into the boat, and they freeze up. I’ve seen it a hundred times. More, probably.

One of my favorites was aboard a salmon charter boat, where I was helping out as a deckhand. There was a particular way this boat fished — rod parallel to the sea, steady pressure on the barbless hook, and above all, never set the circle hooks we used. All the novice anglers listened to our little tutorial as we steamed out to the salmon grounds, and they all caught their fish with little fanfare.

Not so a couple middle-aged men. Both accomplished anglers in freshwater, they were accustomed to setting the hook with enough force to pierce an alligator’s jaw. This, you should know, is not useful with salmon, which have soft mouths. One guy figured it out after a few misses. All good. In my world, there is no stupid question except for the one you’ve already asked me three times. The other guy just couldn’t get it, and worse, kept saying his way was fine.

That’s the trap: Muscle memory is real, and if he had been apologetic about his ripping the lips off a dozen salmon, we’d at least have had some sympathy. But he didn’t. He was scared, if we’re really talking deep here. His fear was looking less than. Finally, his wife physically restrained him — twice — and he got his salmon.

That moment stuck with me. Not because he missed fish, which happens, but because fear can make us grip harder instead of listening when the rules change.

The lesson here is, I think, to tap your inner Chumbawamba. Always. If you get knocked down, get up again. But with one extra bit: Cheerfully put yourself into situations where you’ll get “knocked down,” get up, bruises be damned, and then laugh about it with all those drinks they sing about in that song. That’s living. That’s real fun.