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Location: Salt Lake City, UT
Meteorologically speaking, an inversion occurs when a colder air mass forms at the surface, trapped by a warmer air mass aloft. (Normally, temperature decreases with altitude.) Air near the Earth’s surface is prevented from mixing with the rest of the troposphere above.
In the Salt Lake Valley, winter inversions are common primarily because of high mountains to the west and east that minimize winds that would otherwise agitate and break them up. Because the air in the valley can’t mix vertically or horizontally, pollution builds.
Last week, all was hazy. At night, the thick air moved about town as if it were a scene from a horror flick. For the past few days, rain and snow have fallen; hopefully, the particulate matter fell with it.
Inversions occur not only in the air.
I moved to downtown Salt Lake City last week. About a month ago, I retired as a full-time athlete. For more than 10 years, sport was what guided my life, it provided me direction, and required training day after day. Sport brought me to dozens of countries, in contact with so many people and cultures. It kept me outside, whether under blue skies, rainy skies, sleeting skies, or snow. It wasn’t my life, but it was a big part of my identity. Not a day went by that I didn’t think about it. I’m grateful for the experiences, the successes, and even the failures. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But it did keep me from having a home, maintaining relationships with my family and friends, and having any semblance of a “real” relationship.
My life now couldn’t be more different.
Last Friday, I made the final move to Salt Lake from rural Heber City, 45 minutes away. It is the first time in more than 10 years that I have had all of my possessions in one place, one zip code. I brought only my mattress and a tiny table for furniture from Vermont. That’s all the furniture I really owned. Over the past two weeks, I have been to IKEA seven times. I bought my first microwave. My first dining table and chairs. I received my first electric bill in the mail last week. It’s all very exciting, as mundane as those things might seem.
After all the furniture buying (and constructing), pseudo-decorating (my walls are still bare), and moving was done, I had a preview of real life, why it continues to defy explanation by the most inquisitive, scientific, and artistic minds our species can put forth.
What strikes me is that if you’re not a religious person, you really have to create your own meaning and purpose in life.
As an athlete, purpose is provided for you, it’s inherent, it’s why you train. Being an athlete is easy, besides all the hard work, skiing in the rain, coping with failure, pushing through the pain, all that stuff. Every morning, you awake and know that what you do, what you invest in training that day (or planning or recovering), will be rewarded with better results during the competition season. Your improvement can be easily measured, either with time trials, laboratory test results, or during the competition season, on the results sheet. You can’t hide from hard work. Unless you take EPO.
In real life, your investment is not guaranteed to be rewarded. Your progress can’t be measured. Sometimes, as in the case with starting a relationship, the more work and effort you put in, the worse they will turn out. The more likely the other person is going to think you are obsessive and manic. Likewise, you can’t measure your success as a person as you can yourself as an athlete. We try, with money, possessions, social status, but they really miss the point of what we all want to measure: happiness.
And while in sport there is this pipeline of development, from beginner to expert, from local races to the Olympic Games, there isn’t one in life. There are an infinite number of ways to get from where you are now to greater happiness in the future. You can only measure that progress intrinsically.
And to throw this even more into a centrifuge and discombobulator, who would want to be happy all the time? Maybe some people, but they would miss the greatest instigator of self-development: challenge and trauma. Our true character is shown by how we persevere through the rough times, how we overcome the odds, what we learn through our struggles. No one wants to be in constant struggle, though, so we don’t want to measure unhappiness, do we? Read Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky, if you need a lesson in suffering and existentialism.
So then how do you measure personal growth? You can’t. You can only measure how many years it’s been since you came into this world.
This brings me back to the point I was trying to make: that my life now is an inversion of its former self. Even after one week, my life has stretched into dimensions I never knew existed. The only certainty I see is that life is uncertain. It is fragile. It is never clear. There is more to know then we will ever know. There exist more places than we can ever visit. We cannot do it all.
So what is to be done? As an alien to this new world, I can provide an objective point-of-view on this, for I prognosticate that the longer you live in this real world, potentially the less objective you can be of it.
To put my hypothesis simply: live like a child. Of course, don’t forget to pay your bills, save money, take out the trash, and show up for work. But don’t allow your maturity to distract you from the beauty and complexity of our world, of the people around you. Don’t assume that simply because everyone else lives the born-school-job-marry-kids-die life, that you have to do the same. Don’t become too comfortable. Avoid routine. Spice your life every so often with meeting new people, visiting new places, studying a new language, taking up new hobbies, writing your partner a love letter, surprising him with flowers, cooking her an exotic meal. Shock it every decade by quitting your job, going on vacation to a far off place for a month (together), and finding new meaning.
If you don’t shock it yourself, life inevitably will hand you something that will: illness, death, divorce. As much as these are tragedies, appreciate the opportunity to define these moments by how you overcame them, not how they overwhelmed you.
And perhaps the biggest lesson: treat other people as you did when you were a kid. No, don't throw temper tantrums or bite the boy that stole your cookie. Don't hit the kid that called you a loser with a baseball bat (sorry, Scott). What I mean is, when you were a kid, maybe like me, up until a certain age, you weren't cognizant of another kid's wealth, accomplishments, or shortcomings. What mattered was the cool drawing he made, how well she kicked a ball, the goofy hair he showed up with that day, the funny word she said. Only as we grow older, do we acquire from society the tendency to judge oneanother. We separate ourselves from each other based on wealth, ethnicity, disability, political and religious beliefs, sexual identity, education, occupation. We end up surrounded by like-minded friends and colleagues. So live like a child, accept everyone at first, appreciate what they might bring to your life.
And help others. Leave the world better than you found it at birth.
Finally, my biggest fear has always been over becoming average and being satisfied with the status quo. That is akin to staring at a blank piece of canvas, with the most exquisite paints at hand, and saying, “My, what a beautiful white canvas that is,” and not painting anything because you’re afraid to try. You’re afraid to paint because you might ruin it. So you don’t take the chance. And that canvas of life that you have been given slowly turns grey, then yellow, the paints dry up, the brushes stiffen, and life becomes merely existence, survival, routine. That is my biggest fear, that at the opportunities when I can paint something beautiful, I fail to take the risk, I hesitate, and I set the brush down.
As an athlete, I had the excuse that I had to go to sleep so that I could awake fresh and ready for training, I couldn’t risk a kiss for fear of getting sick, I couldn’t stop to admire a view because that would allow my heart rate to fall and minimize training effect. They are valid. I didn’t take those risks, I worked hard, and ended up an Olympian.
But no longer do I have those excuses. Now my life is inverted.
Brian
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