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SKATEBOARDING IS BASICALLY JUST EXPENSIVE MEDITATION FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SIT STILL

  • Posted by Dez Fontaine Tue at 3:00 PM Filed in Personal #Culture  #concrete  #mental health  #Meditation  #skateboarding  36 views
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    I didn't realize I was meditating until my therapist asked me what I was doing with my board four times a week and I had to actually think about it. Not in some zen master way where I'm sitting cross-legged humming at the universe. More like this broken version of meditation where the cost of entry is a busted ankle and the reward is maybe thirty seconds of your brain shutting the hell up.

    Here's what nobody tells you about skateboarding that the Instagram skate clips don't capture. It's not really about the tricks or looking cool or even landing something gnarly in front of your crew. At least not after the first few years. After that it becomes something else entirely. It becomes the only place where your brain stops running seventeen different conversations simultaneously and just focuses on one thing: the board under your feet and the concrete in front of you.

    I used to think people who said stuff like "skating is my therapy" were full of it. Sounded like something a dude with a trust fund would say while wearing Supreme and sipping an oat milk latte. But then I stopped skating for like eight months because life got sideways and my anxiety was through the roof. I wasn't sleeping right. I was eating trash and refreshing my phone every thirty seconds like it owed me money. My brain felt like static on a dead cable channel.

    Got back on the board one random Thursday and it took me exactly four kickflips to remember why people talk like this. Not because I landed them clean or anything. I ate pavement on three of them. But during those moments when I'm actually committed to a trick, when your body knows what it's supposed to do and you're just executing it, there's no room for the noise. No room for overthinking about whether you're doing enough or being enough or moving fast enough through your own life. It's just you and physics and the four wheels beneath you.

    The meditation part isn't spiritual. It's practical. It's your mind getting tired from focusing so hard on one specific task that it forgets how to worry. It's your nervous system chilling out because you have to be present or you'll eat concrete. You can't worry about your rent while you're learning a heelflip. You can't spiral about your love life when you're figuring out how to lock in a boardslide. Your brain literally doesn't have the bandwidth for both.

    And yeah it costs money. A decent setup is like three hundred to four hundred dollars depending on where you shop and what quality you want. That's real. That's not gatekeeping, that's just math. You could get a gym membership for cheaper and technically that's also meditation in motion. But there's something different about doing it outside in public where you might fail in front of actual human beings. Where you might look stupid. Where you have to commit anyway.

    The real meditation magic happens in the repetition though. Landing the same trick over and over. Trying something you've tried a hundred times already because today feels different. Building muscle memory while your brain is just riding along in the back seat for once. That's the stuff they can't sell you. That's what keeps people coming back even when they're broke and their knees sound like Rice Krispies and they've got seventeen other things they should probably be doing instead.

    I think that's why skaters tend to be calmer people once they get past the ego phase. Not because they're enlightened or anything. Just because they've found a legal way to force their brain to stop for a minute. To exist in their body instead of in their head. To trade the anxiety of doing everything for the simple focused pressure of doing one thing really well.

    So yeah. Call it meditation if you want. Call it expensive therapy. Call it wasting time in a parking lot. But whatever it is, it works. And right now with everything loud and everything broken and everyone angry, I think we all need more ways to make our brains shut up.

    What's the thing you do that actually quiets your mind down? Because I'm realizing most people don't have one.