I just committed to buy my first-ever season pass to ski and snowboard at Steamboat. It didn’t even occur to me that for many reasons right now, that might have been stupid.

The ‘many reasons’ run the gamut, from finances and new work projects to personal, emotional, and oh, yeah, that little thing about my surgery. In March I tore my calf and Achilles, got stitched up, went four months without walking on two legs, and now can’t wait to strap back into that snowboard. Meanwhile, I’m starting a new chapter in my life. In a nutshell (so we can get on to more interesting things), I’m sweating finances while trying to maintain the signature enthusiasm that seems to be paying off in my writing work lately. This winter I’ve chosen to cultivate that enthusiasm by living near my mountain condo in Steamboat Springs, Colorado (which is a rental, meaning I can only stay here between paying guests). I got a taste for this lifestyle over three months last fall while wrapping up the first draft of the forthcoming book, Living Richly.

Of all the things I’ve done this year, two stand out as providing a pure sense of joy: carving turns on the mountain and making these little black marks on your computer screen. Occasionally I wax poetic about that similarity: how good days skiing or snowboarding are a lot like writing, in that you leave your mark on a pristine white surface. Signatures, a new ski film this season, set in Japan, plays with this very notion.

You say: “That all sounds peachy, but where’s the bravery? Where’s the stupidity?” I take a break to think about it, fetching my arnica oil and massaging it into the dull ache just beneath my new three-inch scar. Ah, that’s it: skiing and snowboarding are ways to leave your mark on the world— and ways the world can leave its mark on you. It’s not insignificant that tomorrow night I’ll see a little of the late great Arne Backstrom in the premiere of the new Warren Miller film (he also skied for other movie companies, including Sweetgrass, makers of Signatures). Backstrom died this year while leaving his mark on the mountains of Peru.

I’ve skied my whole life: it’s gotten to where the life- and limb-threatening aspects of my sport rarely cross my mind. Perhaps that’s why we occasionally have to get stupid: to remind us what we’re doing. End-of-year parties at ski resorts do just that: racing down the mountain in cardboard floats, skimming across icy ponds in coconut-bikinis, shots of tequila before backflipping into the hotel pool (not me, but I’ve met a few) … If we’re going to risk our lives for something we love, it oughta be exhilarating, right? Not just this sappy poetry about carving undulating calligraphic arcs down the smooth white skin of mother mountain.

The silly stupidity of springtime ski resort antics, like the satire of The Onion, allows us to look our everyday absurdity— and dangerous behaviors— right in the eye. Chasing a passion that could kill you, bankrupt you, or turn you into another twitchy mountain-town freak might be called absurd before it was called brave. Yes, putting a plank or two on my feet and navigating down snow and ice on a steep mountainside, that’s a bit of an odd calling. Like men elbowing each other to steal an orange bouncy-ball and hurl it at a metal ring attached to a board. The only difference is that skiing’s occasionally dangerous and actually cool and basketball— well, I better stop there.

When I dropped my desk job to become a freelance writer, people told me how brave that was. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Now I realize it was a departure from the norm, a risky endeavor, an exhilarating challenge. To make sure we don’t lose sight of our everyday acts of bravery, I recommend frequent acts of stupidity.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

P.S. In honor of the 100th anniversary of scouting, this is blog no. 10 in a 12-part monthly series on the Boy Scout Law. Today: “A scout is brave.”

Photos by Boo-Creative

Part of a 12-blog series for the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts.

Scout Law point #8: “A scout is cheerful.” Or else.

Does that really have to be a law? Doesn’t making it a law take some of the cheer out of it? Or if you’re really cheery, does it matter what’s required and what’s optional?

As my own form of happy lawlessness, I’ll more or less completely shift gears now. We are social animals. It’s not natural, or particularly cheerful, to be a recluse. Don’t believe the writer’s conceit: that we’re actually writing down real experience. Ideally we go out and live life for a while, jot some notes in our pocket spiral pad, and eventually hole up somewhere to try and write down what happened. It’s kind of like scrapbooking. Creepy, right? Sorry scrapbookers, but you aren’t exactly living in the present, are you?

Perhaps I underestimate the present-tense appeal of photo corners, squiggly scissors, and puffy paint. But look at the photos you’re pasting in there: you saved them and you’re sharing them for a reason, right? Probably a particularly happy time? Or a moment that brings past emotions forward to the present where they clash with our current state of mind? That might explain the night I spent many months ago, picking photos of my brother’s dog, Brutus. It was a tribute, a sort of scrapbook I created, on the day I heard he died.

Yes, we should learn from the past, but I think we underestimate our need to find something to be cheerful about in the present. Some big brain once said we only use 10 percent of our brains. I think that’s good: brains are overrated. What if we stopped trying to use our brains so much and let current experience inform our guts, our hearts, those less brainy parts of ourselves that control critical functions like, oh, say, keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing.

When we realize that there are physical costs we pay for emotional stress— hello backaches, migraines, ulcers, heartburn, and all the follies of the accident-prone multi-tasker— we realize maybe we should take better care of these machines that surround and transport us physically through the world. Without these little flesh and bone jalopies of ours, we would be naked ghostly psyches roaming the world passing our wispy hands right through all the faces we actually long to touch. Don Hertzfeldt illustrated a bizarre variation on this— a population of brains attached to spinal cords roaming the earth— in his animated short, Everything Will Be OK.

I’m a tyrant to scrapbookers? It takes one to know one. I love the past: I dwell there often in my career and in my hobbies. But I’ve learned to believe that if it’s really that magical, we shouldn’t dwell there. Bring that magic back to our world here and now.

I’ve been calling Steve’s new dog ‘Brutus.’ All it took was a little present-tense wrestling, a few toy-stealing antics that were purely Flash (and nothing to do with Brutus), and I’m cheerfully back from scrapbook la-la land, loving the present.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Photos © SeattleHamiltons