He Was Still Skiing: How You Hold Hard Things Matters

We've been making this trip for nearly a decade. Same time of year, same mountain, same rhythm of spring skiing — the kind where the snow gets heavy and the crowds thin out and you're grateful for it even when the conditions are a little ragged around the edges.

This year was different.

By the time we arrived at Park City, the resort was running at about 40% capacity. By the time we left, they'd consolidated everything to a single chairlift with two blue runs and a handful of blacks. We were skiing at 8,500 feet in 60-degree temperatures, the kind of warmth that belongs to a different season entirely.

By the second day, riding up that lift, I looked over and saw a golf tee box.

Not in the distance. Right there. Normally buried under several feet of snow, apparently close enough to the lift corridor that someone had chosen the location assuming no one would ever actually see it from the chair. I knew there was a golf course somewhere nearby. I didn't know it was that nearby.

And it wasn't like the heat had slowly melted it into view over the course of the week. The snow was already gone. That's when it really sunk in — this wasn't a low snow year. This was something else entirely.

People were frustrated. Reasonably so. You could hear it in the lift lines, feel it in the way conversations drifted toward what used to be open, what the mountain looked like in better years. And underneath that frustration — at least for some people — was something heavier. The tee box wasn't just an oddity. It was evidence.

I get it. The spiral is understandable. Maybe even appropriate for a moment.

But I noticed something else too.

One of the locals skied that mountain most every day. And he wasn't out there grudgingly making the best of things — he was genuinely in it. Whether it was four hours or forty-five minutes, he was skiing. He wasn't complaining about what was closed. He was just skiing.

His joy in it wasn't conditional on the conditions being right.

I see this pattern in other places. Think about people who get fussy when they're cooking in someone else's kitchen — the stove isn't gas, the knives aren't sharp enough, nothing is where it should be. But if your joy lives in the cooking itself, in the meal you're making for people you care about, then you adapt and you get on with it. If your joy lives in having the perfect setup, the imperfect kitchen will take the whole experience from you.

The local wasn't ignoring the tee box. He could see it just as clearly as I could. He just wasn't letting the alarm consume what he came there for.

What The Local Understood

Here's what I've been sitting with since we got home.

The spiral doesn't protect the snow. Staying inside the grief and the evidence and the wrongness of it — that doesn't slow anything down or speed anything up. What it does is take the day. And then the next one. And somewhere in that accumulation, it starts to take something else: the energy and the clarity and the genuine motivation that long-term change actually requires.

Presence and purpose aren't opposites. They might actually need each other.

This isn't about silver linings. The tee box is real. The 60-degree temperatures are real. Calling it "fine" would be dishonest, and I'm not interested in that kind of reframe.

What I'm interested in is the question the local seemed to have already answered for himself: what do you want your energy to be inside this?

Because how you answer that question shapes everything about how you move through what's ahead.

Staying In It

Think about life-altering news — the kind that pulls your attention immediately into everything you can't control, every worst-case version of what comes next. The spiral there is even more understandable. And still — the person who can hold the fear and enjoy today's walk, and make the Monday phone call, and start asking questions about what's possible — that person is living more of their life and probably navigating the hard thing more effectively.

The alarm has information. It's worth hearing. But there's a difference between hearing it and being swallowed by it.

I rode that chairlift past the tee box more than once. After the first jolt of seeing it, something shifted — not acceptance, just clarity. And with that, my vision opened to other things: the landscaping that's normally buried, the shape of the terrain underneath, the summertime secrets the snow usually keeps. I skied the runs that were open. The snow was still snow, even at 60 degrees.

And I came home unsettled by what I saw — that tee box shouldn't have been visible, and I know what it means that it was. But I also came home having actually been there. Present for what it was, not just what it wasn't. And that presence gave me something: a full enough tank to actually sit with the concern rather than be flattened by it. To engage with the questions that followed me home rather than just carry the weight of them.

You can't meet what matters from an empty place. The things worth caring about need us awake and in our lives — not just alarmed from a distance. Presence isn't a retreat from the hard things. Sometimes it's how you build the capacity to face them.

What do you want your energy to be inside the hard things you're carrying?

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