Skiing: Luxury or Necessity?

Many consider skiing to be a luxury, a most enjoyable leisure activity well suited to the middle and upper class as a highly effective way to consume disposal income. Snowboarding, on the other hand, is simply a universally effective means to aggravate skiers.  But, I digress.

In my younger days, I used to ski a lot, preferring the downhill variety to cross-country for the accompanying speed, thrill, cool clothes, and fashionable status.   Several years have passed, the exact number of which do not need to be stated here.   During that time, I matured, at least in theory... although how much is up for debate.  I grew to love cross-country skiing over its downhill counterpart, not simply because my joints were more likely to survive the experience but also because the peace that came with every passing stroke of ski and pole was hard to find anywhere else.

Herein lies one of the very few downsides of spending the winters in Florida.   Opportunities to ski have become much fewer and farther between.   Nevertheless, every year, when I return to the Pacific Northwest in late March, I make a day to ski in the middle of the craziness that is academic life. This single day of skiing has become an annual ritual.  As I head out in the wee morning hours on my one precious day every year, I find that I am heading to the hills for more than peace and quiet.  Unlike the early days, when all I thought about while skiing was skiing, I can now think about so much more because skiing has become automatic, much like riding a bicycle.

As my thoughts wander here, there, and everywhere, many of the half baked ideas or research problems that have lingered in the back of my mind, unsolved and unresolved, gradually start to become much more clear.  This incubation process is both a result of and a delight with spending hours in this forested alpine world that is both immensely beautiful and profoundly silent.  The blanket of snow that still covers these slopes in early spring has a wonderful way of quieting the natural silence of the forest even further.

In the middle of this silence, my mind naturally wanders to the problems, the dilemmas, the quandaries that have remained unsolved.  Whether they be in research, in teaching, or in relationship, these unsolvables are transferred to a special storage container in my brain.  On skiing day, when all the other cares of the world disappear and the world is white, clean, and at peace with itself, my mind unlocks this Pandora's box of unsolved problems and ponders them ... without my conscious bidding.

As the miles go by underneath the quiet swish of my skis skating along the snow, many of those problems that seemed to be more cerebral spaghetti than pathways of reason, unravel, reform, and reshape over and over again.   Some remain spaghetti at the end of the day, but many become clear, ordered rational solutions to take back home and to work where the cycle of grant proposals, new students, and new projects will soon begin again.

After packing the car up from a long day of trekking through the snow, my body is tired, my heart at peace, and my mind unusually calm.   

I wonder if I can deduct my ski pass and mileage as an employment expense.  

Probably not.   The IRS would likely not understand nor allow.