Amazing

I may be one of the last people on the planet to have found out about this, but  friend of mine sent me this video yesterday morning. Later in the day, as I was browsing through the New York Times online, I noticed this op ed piece about the cyclist, Danny MacAskill, and the impact that the video, which according to the article is “the Top Favorited sports video in YouTube History,” on McAskill’s life.

What interested me about the video is not so much what it shows, mind-boggling as that may be, but what it implies about what isn’t shown: the the 10,000+ hours of practice, the falls, the miscues, the injuries, the pain. I’ve never quite grokked the skateboarding ethos: kids on the street spending hours and hours obsessively practicing a set of skills that have no practical value and often constitute an considerable annoyance to those within earshot. For what, exactly? But out of every thousand kids who waste amazing amounts of time on something they’ll never be much good at, and at the expense of learning something else that might actually serve a purpose, for them or somebody else, there are always perhaps one or two guys like MacAskill who manage to raise their skill level in whatever idiosyncratic discipline they are engaged in to the point where it’s somehow transcendent, inspirational, even somehow spiritual. The Zen of Bicycling.

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