Fall. Choke. Repeat.

It happens so fast your mind barely has enough time to register.

One moment you’re in total control, or at least trying to convince yourself you are, the next you’re in mid fall. You try to figure out exactly how you lost the edge before you allow yourself to give into the sensation. Or at least, before you try to convince yourself that you’re giving in and not being forced into the fall.

You remember thinking it was a good idea at the time. What could go wrong? Right? It didn’t look nearly as difficult from your warm, dry, safe seat on the boat. But now that you find yourself floating in the water, some thirty odd feet behind the boat, a tow rope in hand, trying to find a sense of balance which the large bulky skis on your feet make more than difficult, you begin to question whether you are actually capable of something so seemingly impossible. And then the motor starts and you actually begin to move and you know in an instant that things are not going to end well.

The boat has barely started but you know almost instantly that you are losing your center of balance. You could fight it, try to stop yourself, but what’s the worst that could happen? A little extra water in your lungs? A little bruise to your ego? Well, I say bruise away. What’s the fun of never falling down? Where’s the unexpected journey?

In reality, your body is about to fail you, and the sooner you accept it and stop fighting it the better things will be for you. Prepare yourself, you are about to do a face plant into the surface of the water. There is not enough time to block your nose or to take a deep breath. The water will shoot up your nose in the burning, uncomfortable fashion that water has of entering a place it should never have been to begin with. You will resurface sputtering and choking, looking in all directions to find the skis which moments before had been on your feet and now manage to have traveled several feet in opposite directions. This is all inevitable. It cannot be avoided.

And yet some how, after you survive all this, after you have managed to swim around like the awkward duck you are, regain your skis, and clumsily stumbling about to put them on again, you will make another attempt. They yell instructions to you from the boat. Something about your shoulders and your feet. You nod and pretend like you completely understand but in reality their voices are too muffled by the wind and the water in your ears for you to have heard much of anything at all. You square your shoulders and attempt to lean back and balance, because you think, at least your pretty sure, that this is what you heard them tell you to do. You try to focus your mind, you are determined that this is going to be it, you will be successful. And then the boat begins to move, and once again you find yourself being pulled forward, except this time you feel your body start to emerge, not quite out of the water but close. And you begin to think that this is going to be it, your actually going to fully surface, and then the confidence is gone and you feel your upper body being pulled off course, face smacking into the water, leaving you with no choice but to let go of the rope.

You will try again, maybe only one or two more times this afternoon, but you will try again. If not today, then on another day, you will make it out of the water. And on that day, in the instant that you realize your entire body has surfaced, your skis are skimming across the surface, and that you are essentially skiing on water. You will then throw your fist up in the air triumphantly, subsequently causing you to lose your center of balance and once more you will find yourself falling, face hovering inches above the waters surface, about to smack into it harder then you ever have before. And it will feel great!

And sometimes, through an experience like this you learn something about yourself.

Today, I learnt this...I making wiping out look damn good.