The made-up number of hours it takes to master a particular skill is ten thousand. At my current rate, I’ll be a master ice skater by the year of our Lord 8693.
Each winter, my spouse’s family spends a few days in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York. And once per trip, we dutifully navigate the area’s icy, dicey roads to the village of Lake Placid, where the Olympic ice skating oval is open for public skating for ninety minutes each evening.
The first time I joined this pilgrimage was shortly after Bethany and I were engaged in 2019, and I was the grumpy kind of terrified. My previous skating experience was limited to one day of awkward, anxious shuffling on a middle-school field trip. And I’ve never been particularly fond of new things, outdoor things, things I’m bad at, things I’m being forced to do, or sports.
But I was determined to prove my admirable adaptability, so I put on the rented skates and stepped out onto the ice, holding Bethany’s hand for the first few halting laps.
I was very, very scared of falling.
So I didn’t. Summoning every bit of caution and control I could muster, I avoided tumbling to the ice, even once I was skating on my own. I was slow, I was jittery, I’d frozen my face into a wide-eyed expression of mild panic, but I was upright.
And by the end, I was feeling good. I’d survived this particular test of will and devotion, and although I was sore in places I didn’t know I had, the whole thing went much better than the skiing experiment the previous day.
In the years since, I’ve slowly gotten more comfortable on the ice. I still hold Bethany’s arm for the first couple laps, and I’m sure my face still makes that panicked grimace. But by halfway through the skating sessions, I start having a tiny bit of fun. I even start to wonder if there might be something to this whole “being outside in the winter on purpose” thing.
And I’ve still never fallen. That is, until a week ago.
But first let me set the scene. This year, I was dreading ice skating almost as much as I was on that first trip in 2019. Not because I didn’t know how to skate, but because the temperature in Lake Placid was zero degrees Fahrenheit with a negative-twelve wind chill.
Despite my cleverly dropped hints about how this was a good year to find a nice indoor activity (maybe even one we could do sitting down?), I once again found myself walking grumpily to the skating oval. To cope, I reached into the archives of American religious history.
The twentieth-century preacher Norman Vincent Peale was famous for popularizing a New Thought approach to Christianity: God wants you to be happy, and—great news!—you can be happy, if you just think the right happy thoughts and pray with the right happy faith.
Normally, of course, I find this theology abominable. But given the absurdity of intentionally going outside in subzero temps, why not give Peale’s absurdity a try? So I coined some catchphrases for the evening: God wants you to be warm! Cold is just the universe lying to you! Think toasty thoughts! Channel the power of positive-temperature thinking!
This almost worked. I skated five or six laps, gradually feeling less crabby, more peaceful, and even a bit warmer. Then, about a hundred feet from where I was going to end my last lap (I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore, you see), I lost my balance and crashed backwards onto the ice.
Maybe Peale or God or Peale’s God was still looking out for me, because I narrowly escaped landing on my glasses and destroying them. But I was still pretty banged up (more emotionally than physically, I’ll admit) and my nose did start randomly bleeding even though it hadn’t hit anything. So it was a rough scene for a delicate orchid like myself. (That’s my spouse’s appellation, borrowed from YA author and fellow delicate orchid John Green.)
Immediately I was grumpy again. I felt eight-year-old Josh whine from somewhere inside me: Why did we come here???? I’m never doing this again!!!
But apparently (I’m being told) falling one time doesn’t mean that I’m bad at skating, that I should never skate again, or that I’ve wasted a whole .001% of my last six wild and precious years pursuing this horrible hobby. Apparently I can just shrug it off, blaming the very real cold for dulling my normally razor-sharp reflexes. Apparently I’m committed to being a good sport again next year.
And I will: I’ll skate again, and I’ll enjoy it, maybe even from the beginning. But I’m accepting ideas for new theological skating catchphrases. That Peale guy really didn’t know what he was talking about.
Photo by Wikimedia Commons user LunchboxLarry (CC BY 2.0). Cropped from original.
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
