Monthly Archives: December 2008

Cat Wisdom Wednesday: Skating

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One of my greatest pleasures is the feeling of gliding across the ice, legs and arms gracefully extended, able to feel the energy stretching out to my fingertips. Or spinning quickly on a blade, laying my body back and stretching my arms up above me while my hair blows about with the speed I’ve created.

These are pictures of me, about 7 years ago:

Jumping

Layback Spin

Spinning

This winter, I began teaching ice skating lessons at a rink in the area.  It’s an outdoor rink, and I teach basic skills. I’m really enjoying it.  It’s helped me to remember why I fell in love with skating in the first place – around 17 years ago.

Certainly, it was enchanting – the feel of the brisk air around you, as you jump and twirl on the edge of a blade.  And the daredevil, athletic side of me loved the idea of jumping around, as my brother would call it, “on frozen water with knives on my feet.”  But it was more than that.   Whether it was performing for a crowd or skating on a practice session with no spectators at all, skating was the most fun sport I had tried (and it still is).   I love the challenge, to strive to always be ever so perfectly balanced, but not to let on how difficult it is.

But much preparation went into it, and at practice sessions I had to try again and again, learning how to teach my body the exact movements needed to land a difficult jump.  So that’s why I’ve chosen this as the new quotation for my Cat Wisdom Wednesday series, from George Bernard Shaw:

I learned to speak as people learn to skate or cycle, by doggedly making a fool of myself until I got used to it.

Still trudging along

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I’ve been so busy, doing so much, over the past few weeks, that I haven’t taken the time to sit down, reflect, and write about it.  It’s been up and down, emotionally. But things are going well, as well as they could be, really, in this economy.  At this point it’s abundantly clear that the economy is in the shitter, and this is of course affecting us as we try and launch a new web company.

But it doesn’t mean we can’t do it.  A handful of strong companies built themselves after the first dot-com bubble burst, and there are things to be said for starting a company in a recessive economy.  The key is to know how to use the economic environment to your advantage.  There are some ways that we can do that – I think chief among them making use of our young, cheap, and agile workers.  Although, of our team members, Husband and I have the most financial burden to worry about, even we don’t have a family to feed, school tuitions to pay, a mortgage, or even a desire to keep up a moderately well-off lifestyle.  So we can run our company in “ultra light” mode and still produce and develop at a rate that would cost older, more developed professionals much more.  I see that as a strength, especially in this environment.  But it’s still an uphill battle.