Editor’s note: Now two weeks before the lifts again start spinning and we’re looking at another winter season, the timing felt right to run this longer reflection from columnist Andrew Parrott on the meaning of offseason.
Offseason provides a pregnant pause, a respite, a release. For these reasons, it is my least favorite season, and one with which I often struggle. My natural inclination is toward more — to stay in motion. More time, more adventures, more experiences, more spring and summer days full of a competition to utilize and combine every toy in the storage unit from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and then, like Dawes sings, “when the tequila runs out we’ll be drinking champagne.”
As fall and winter approach and encroach, an “Aspen Extreme’’ once rich with energy and possibility seems to fill with darkness and depression, creeping into my psyche a little more each day as the sun now seemingly sets at 2 p.m. That darkness recently found me on a Sky Mountain Loop with a bear and frozen feet, my long-held notions about “usable light” challenged, my quixotic attempts to reclaim summer thwarted. The streets are silent, and it feels as if the valley walls are closing in.
Stillness does not equate to peace, yet without peace, there can be no stillness. And so many people in this valley — myself included — often choose to move. To Central American beaches, to different sports and circadian rhythms, to sun and sand and life forces. This is a natural tendency, even a healthy one. As Tom Robbins wrote, “The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.”
Yet I’ve learned to appreciate the fall pause, however uncomfortable and at times unwelcome it may feel. I follow the advice of Hemingway and “never confuse movement with action.” I embrace the stillness, and try to find it within myself. To value and seek to learn from the seasonality, to understand that I’m probably just uncomfortable because it mirrors life — and one day, despite my best attempts, I’m going to get hurt, and I’m also going to die. To sit with real discomfort and in so doing, to let the thoughts, feelings and impulses arise that prevent lasting peace, instead of conflating peace with more vitamin D and warmer temperatures. Although sometimes this is wholly appropriate and has been a useful tactic for 13 years running: across Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Belize and Cuba.
Since mid-May, I have weekly shared the most costly lessons I have learned throughout nearly four decades on this spinning blue boulder. I admit “lessons” sounds pedantic, if not preachy. What I’ve actually done is share several highly questionable hypotheses I have on life, which have been stress-tested across the globe, from jail cells in Long Bay, Jamaica to departed friends and relationships that did not end or do not exist in the way I envisioned, to my overt enthusiasm for Type 2 Fun and action sports. I understand loss very well, which is why I don’t like to sit still.
I have also made it repeatedly, abundantly and comically clear that I have no navigational sense — read at your own peril. The meandering roadmap I have offered is one which only a fool would follow intentionally, yet I hope the tone has carried like that of a friend, talking over tequila neat at Woody Creek Tavern or Steeps.
My time in Aspen has given me every boyhood fantasy and then some, with adult ones to boot. Life in this valley has been a perpetual Peter Pan journey of “second star to the right and straight on ’till morning.” That, I have always been able to navigate. My favorite part of life has long been seeing the curious, enthralled 12-year-old in the eyes of friends of any age around the globe as we adventure, explore and expand together. That essence is important to nurture, celebrate, revel in, retain.
For a few years, I’ve been editing my life to reflect an ethos of “less,” not “more,” with some notable detours along the way. I’d encourage anyone to listen to the immortal lyrics of “How Do You Stop” by James Brown, the godfather of funk (“free your mind and your ass will follow,” as George Clinton would later say), who is also the godfather of soul (Brown taught us how to both funk and feel). Freedom, as I opined in “Closer to free” published July 2, is not a noun, it’s a verb. And before you can free yourself (verb), you have to feel it (emotion). It has to be the truth, which, per David Foster Wallace, will set you free — “but first it will piss you off.”
Lori Kret and Jeff Cole at Aspen Relationship Institute gave me the simple formula for peace, which is not to be confused with ease or happiness, although sometimes there’s overlap. What there is prodigious amounts of, ultimately, is joy, of the J.D. Salinger “liquid vs. solid” variety.
The formula is elegantly, deceptively simple: “Why am I doing this?” then “What is it costing me?” then, finally, “Action.” The ability to honestly name our innermost drivers and desires is self reflection and honesty that evades all but God herself. We will drink, drug, deny, dream, rationalize, compete, coerce and conquer to no end to avoid the real truth of what we are feeling and why, because it is rarely if ever totally pure — and yeah, it usually stems from our trauma, and we all have more than we’d like to admit. Most men have more unresolved “daddy issues” and “mother wounds” than a Magic City stage. There is no end to how humans will harm others when we fail to be uncomfortably honest with ourselves. As Dave Chappelle masterfully illustrates in his latest and last comedy special for Netflix, “The Closer,” not only can people be both, all of us are both, and it’s hypocritical to assume or act otherwise.
We can be a mountain community home to some of the most generous humans, livewire spirits, rebels and raconteurs — people who have superhuman courage, charisma and capabilities. People with heart. Mark “Occy” Occhilupo, an Australian surfer, once gave the late, great Andy Irons the best athletic compliment I have ever heard: “Andy surfs like a cat on acid.” The town of Aspen is full of people who ski, surf, bike, ride, live and love like cats on acid.
And we can be a mountain community where many of these people also struggle with addiction and abuse, whether it’s the 200 miles per week they log running Red Hill, the 25-hour workdays, or the marching powder. As much as we all love life, it is long past time that we openly address the fact that it is not normal to die in our 20s and 30s at foreign surf breaks, or by our own hand or near local rivers in the early morning hours. I am not speaking out of judgment or lack of personal experience; I’m speaking out of love, sorrow, hope. Luck, too, maybe. The best adventurers among us can still die by misadventure, the pursuit of more, and we often do. When this place isn’t heaven — a literal Cloud 9 — it’s hell. It can be both. We can be both. We are. And we need to own this, so that we can better integrate our lives, our relationships, our housing crisis, our politics, our visitors, our locals. In broken Spanish, I once asked an old man sitting on a park bench in Spain what he would tell a 22-year-old about life, if he could only say one sentence. He replied with a smile, “Toda la vida es sol y sombra.”
Back to the lyrics of James Brown:
How do you stop, pouring, pouring rain?
How do you stop, a heart with wings?
And how do you stop, the innocent things?
How, how do you stop, before it’s too late?
And then he delivers the knockout punch: the real cost of being the boss, the price of peace, the thing so many people think is simple and that they do better than everyone else and yet so few people can actually do consistently, even and especially within themselves:
“Don’t lie.”
What is your why — the real why — for every single thing you say and do, and what is it costing you? Like Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” That’s all I’ve learned about life, really. It’s helped me to love better, which is the point of life. Even and especially when it hurts like hell and I know there’s a good chance my honest answer today will be different tomorrow. I take comfort in the suggestion of Lisa Goddard at Roaring Fork Insight that intent, not action, is the ultimate determinant of karma, even if this teaching runs directly contrary to what I have been instructed via performance-based people and institutions for most of my life. I’m rewiring. As the good doctor H.S. Thompson wrote, “I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.”
Sometimes the answer to “How do you stop?” is simple. Writing, like Hemingway famously quipped, is like bleeding onto a page. The time comes when a tourniquet may be necessary to protect the source. So I stop by simply saying, “I’m done, at least for now, and I hope I’ve given this place and people half of what they have given me. I’ll see you when it’s sunnier, maybe in the snow, maybe in the surf, better than yesterday, but not as good as tomorrow.”
"Stop" - Google News
November 12, 2021 at 06:00PM
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Parrott: How do you stop? - Aspen Daily News
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