I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I am finally working my way back around to Things Men Gave Me, with two essays in progress. After doing a developmental edit read-through of my nonfiction book manuscript tackling midlife love, I realized which of my dating and romance memoir stories I might tackle next. I started on the story of how I rekindled a romance with a man I knew from junior high school.
And then, this week, something happened that made me want to write another essay. I got in a ski crash that recalled a ski crash of ten years earlier. I’d like to share the two experiences, how they were different, and how they were the same. But I wonder: Is it ok to write about an event that just happened, rather than processing it more, waiting more time?
When I asked ChatGPT this question it replied:
Your Things Men Gave Me Substack is functioning as both a workshop and a record of evolution — creative, emotional, relational. Sharing essays there in “draft” form mirrors the project’s core themes: unfolding, revision, self-discovery. Readers are following you becoming the person who can write the book, not just reading the finished artifact.
I think that’s reasonable, but anyway, I don’t need a large language model to tell me whether I can write and publish something or not. I am going to work on the essay today and see what happens, recalling Adele Sypesteyn’s classic intuitive painting question that she asks herself when she gets an idea for what to do next: “Let’s see what happens.”
My latest philosophical studies made me think of this ski accident in two different ways: first, as something I could endure and even love (amor fati style) and second, as something almost mystical in its meaningfulness. I suppose turning it into a mystically meaningful memory makes it that much easier to love, despite my terrible injuries.
Part of me of course wishes it didn’t happen, even though it almost seemed fated as in a tragedy. Right before it, I told Ray on the chairlift, “I should ski a bit slower because the faster you go the worse it is if something goes wrong.” I also made some hubristic comment about how my extensive ski experience meant I could right myself when I slid or caught an edge. When the accident happened I had no time to right myself; I didn’t feel the sense of catching an edge or sliding out of control; I was just suddenly rolling down the mountain thinking, “Oh shit! Not again!”
I have a flashbulb memory of the crash, with certain things that happened standing out vividly to me: how clearly I could see snow crystals through my goggles when I lifted up my head after coming to a stop, my lengthy wondering where Ray was (I knew he was behind me, why didn’t he come see if I was ok?), when he finally arrived, my looking up at him and seeing him standing over me holding my skis and my thought, “I lost my skis?” along with a flood of relief that he was there with me. I was going to be ok.
Before the accident, also on the chairlift, Ray mentioned how he thought that once he was garbed in his ski gear, with his helmet on over a balaclava partially obscuring his face, people couldn’t tell his age. I think I agree with that now, because when I looked up at him from my prone position on the icy slope I had no sense of him being an almost seventy year old. I felt instead his suchness and his capabilities, I sensed him not as ageless exactly, but just as himself without putting any concept of age onto it. Early on in our relationship I asked him if the age gap mattered (he is twelve years older than me) and he said no, because he still felt like an eighteen year old. At the moment I looked up at him, you could have told me he was eighteen and I’d believe it. To be more accurate, his age had become immaterial in every way at that moment.
This is something I’m trying to get at in one of the chapters of my book: that putting too many concepts onto people stops you from experiencing them as they truly are. This is for the Reality over Fantasy and Delusion chapter, where I write about how many people flatten out others with their superficial ways of experiencing them: relating to them only based on their level of conventional physical attractiveness or their height or their weight, reducing their emotional complexity to simplistic assessments (“toxic narcissist,” “anxious avoidant,” “a man who wants only sex,” “a woman who just wants a provider”), assuming that demographic characteristics are destiny (thinking that someone’s educational level is an accurate way of assessing their intelligence, filtering out people based on race, using age filters very strictly).
After the accident Ray said, “that was truly reckless, Anne.” And yes it was reckless to ski so fast down an increasingly icy run. This reminded me that for my book I need to clarify that sometimes it’s better to be reckful. The reason why I recommend recklessness to midlife daters who haven’t found what they want romantically is because most of the conventional advice suggests being reckful: develop checklists and filters, define up front the situation and kind of person you will consider, seek an optimal match, be cautious and careful in who and how you interact, quickly judge people in terms of compatibility, attachment style, physical attractiveness, and appropriateness for you. But that doesn’t mean that being reckful never works and doesn’t have its place. It does. I need to be a bit more reckful in my skiing next time. As Ray said, “let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again,” as he opined that I probably caught an outside edge.
I suppose skiing at all at age 57 is a bit reckless regardless. I have many friends who used to ski who’ve given it up: their knees can’t take it or they worry about getting in an accident (a reasonable worry, of course!) But continuing to ski brings me so much joy. Before the accident, Ray and I talked about how meaningful and mystical skiing can be. It turns out a crash can be even more meaningful and mystical than staying upright.