Last weekend, I went to an ice skating show. There were no Olympic athletes, no stars, no one that’s ever been on TV.

We sat on hard wooden bleachers, the rink was a little musty, and there were some audio issues. When the skaters wobbled out onto the ice, most of them looked terrified. Their routines weren’t in sync. None of them could do a Triple Lutz.

One little girl stood alone on the rink in front of a couple hundred people and did nothing except skate backwards.

And she got a standing ovation.

The show only got worse from there. They played the wrong songs for the planned routines. Skaters skidded and missed their jumps.

Some forgot their choreography and quite a few fell hard on their bottoms.

This show was no frozen spectacular…but that wasn’t the point. The skaters were kids and they were learning and as I sat there on the bleachers, I realized that this chilly catastrophe was one of the most amazing shows I’d ever seen. Not only that, it was a metaphor for some very important life lessons.

At one point, I found myself thinking that none of these kids were ever going to end up at the Olympics, but then I realized I was wrong on so many levels. There was a point in the life of everyone who has ever mastered anything, be it ice skating, yoga, a sport, cooking, painting, when that person couldn’t do it at all. From there, they moved on to only a few basic skills. After that they were terrible for a long, long time.

What I’m saying is that the gold medal skaters started off exactly like these little girls—nervous and scared and fumbling. Before the impressive leaps and spins, they had to get really good at simply skating backwards, or just being able to stand still on the ice in their skates.

Getting really good takes years and years of dedicated practice, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t celebrate all the smaller accomplishments along the way.

That’s what this show was about—celebrating the baby steps. It was about putting on a tutu and a tiara and trying. The show was about the pride of what these girls could do right now, in this moment, without any thought of what they might or might not become in the future.

Throughout the performance, I caught myself tearing up at the beauty and simplicity of it, but most of all the unconditional support that the audience showed the performers. The people in the crowd weren’t there to be entertained as much as they were there to applaud the skaters and recognize that what they were doing might be far from the pros, but that it was still a really big deal anyway.

The best part was that every single time one of the girls fell down, everyone in the audience cheered for her even louder when she got back up. This is what the world needs to be doing, I thought.

Whenever we see someone trying at anything we need to show up and encourage them, and when they fall down and get back up we need to clap and yell and whistle for them with all our might.

The message that we were sending those kids out there on the ice that night was that we knew they were brave to do this, we knew they were learning and that we were rooting for them no matter what. We didn’t need them to be perfect, because in that moment, and always, they were good enough in their itchy tulle costumes, forgetting their steps, with stage fright, falling down—whatever.

I’m always amazed at the unexpected ways the Universe finds to teach us.

When I went to the ice show that night, I never expected to come out warmer and wiser. I certainly never expected that my teachers would be a bunch of little girls on skates and their families and friends, but I’m so glad they showed me that trying counts.

In our journeys we don’t need to be perfect from the get-go, and that when we land on our butts, we just have to get right back up and keep gliding over the ice like it never happened.

When we do that, everyone will cheer from the grandstands.

 

 

 

 

Relephant: 

Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Bedroom Floor is a Good Idea.

 
 
 

Author: Victoria Fedden

Editor: Renée Picard 

Photo: Queen Yuna at Flickr