Beginners

The Tax of Mastery

At thirty I took up ice hockey, which is a deranged thing for a grown adult to do. I’d skateboarded most of my life, well enough that my body had a deep, wordless fluency with a board. Skilled enough to think about style on top of the muscle memory. None of it transferred. Ice is not wood or Skatelite or concrete, a hockey stop is nothing like a skateboard’s, and there is a specific humility in being genuinely good at one thing and then standing on a surface that takes all of it away. I described it at the time as trying to learn to play basketball without knowing how to run. I spent a season getting the puck poked off my stick by ten-year-olds. And I loved it.