It’s not exactly the day to go ice skating. I hike my skate bag higher on my shoulder and badge out of the door at work. Sunshine overwhelms all my senses, golden blindness. It takes a moment to blink it away. Spring is in the air, even in February.

It’s nice to go to the rink on lunch, even if the skating time is too short. It’s quiet. You can practice other moves than just skating in a circle.

I pause at the crosswalk. Traffic whooshes by. There’s a break. I race across.

There’s no one on the ice— just big puddles of water in the midday heat.

Why do we learn new things? What makes someone wake up one day in their thirties and say, “I want to learn to ice skate?” I can’t even explain it in myself. It’s become a kind of mania.

“Is it safe to skate with all that water?”

The attendant in the window looks perplexed for an instant. “Oh, yeah. It should be good.”

“Okay.” He hands me back my punch card.

At night, I’ve been watching figure skating tutorials on You Tube and wondering what’s wrong with me. You can’t get very far learning figure skating tricks if you can’t skate independently on either foot. What’s wrong with me is I’ve let my core go, and I’ve perhaps never learned to balance well on my right foot in the first place.

Why do we try to learn new things?

To learn new things about ourselves.

The locker room is empty. I plop down on a bench and begin my rapid ritual, changing from work shoes to skates. Tug on long socks. Foot in boot. Pull the laces as hard and as fast as I can so that the boot is tight up and down my ankle. The laces are the spine of your support…

These are the weird things you learn when you study something new.

I stand— a real giant now. When there are people here, I usually get stares after I stand up in my skates. Tall women do.

Silence hovers over the ice, just like the water— the noisy silence of a town center. Cars passing. People talking. Someone with a personal speaker turned way too loud. And the sounds of my skate edges as they bite the ice for the first time.

When you pick up something new to learn in adulthood— something technical like ice skating— the ghost of inadequacy hovers just over your shoulder.

How good would I be if I’d learned when I was little?

I’m just now discovering skates aren’t completely flat but have a little curve under the ball of your foot called the rocker. And you’ve got to have a decent understanding of how to use it to skate backward.

I stroke (that’s what you call skating in skating) my way around the perimeter, avoiding the wetter spots.

Knowing there’s a rocker and knowing how to use your rockers are two different things.

Just like balancing on one foot while standing at your desk and balancing on one foot while moving forward on the ice are two different things. At least, to my abs, hips, and quads anyways.

Still, I try. I stroke forward, try to shift and center my balance over the top of my right foot, and then lift my left foot. “Stand tall in your hips,” the lady said on the video, “but keep a soft knee.”

Like a pistol squat? I think. No, maybe not that soft of a knee.

I lose it and bring my left foot back down to the ice.

There’s that weakness again. If I were strong enough, I should not only be able to balance on my right leg, but I should be able to freely lift my left foot out in front of me, to the side, and to the back. If you want to learn anything more complicated than forward stroking and swizzles, this is kind of an important basic skill.

Maybe I need to get back to those pistol squats.

Do we learn new things to get ourselves unstuck?

I round back through the center of the ice, keeping my head up— tall through the hips! strong core!— and I lift the right leg and balance on the left. This is a confidence booster because I can do it on this side. I try to check in with my body to see what’s the difference.

The difference is simply that this side feels strong. The other feels like it collapses on itself.

Here’s the irony of learning figure skating to get yourself unstuck from life— if you can only skate independently on one side, you’re just stuck again. You’ll never master three turns or cross-overs and certainly not mohawks. You’ll be competent at moving forward and maybe backward, but you’ll never be flashy. You’ll never be graceful.

I round out to center ice, opposite direction this time, and try for the right leg again.

I never knew until this winter that arms are just as important in their movement as legs and feet in figure skating. Uncontrolled arm movement can sink your practice attempt just as easily as sticking your toe pick straight into the ice while trying to move forward.

I hold my arms out low in front of me. Head over hip. Think tall. Lift foot. Glide.

Hold it.

Glide.

Release and stroke, rounding into the corner. Successful for the moment. For a tiny hair of time.

I might just as easily biff it on the next attempt, but that feeling— that momentary instant of flight— of doing right just what you intended to do and that you couldn’t do right before. That feeling is why learning new things is worth it.

Or maybe it’s just a feeling peculiar to ice skating— which sometimes just feels (and looks) like controlled chaos on blades.

There’s not much winter left, as the 60 degree weather implies, and I feel, somehow, I’ve let myself down because of this weakness.

Will the muscle memory be there next year, I wonder.

When you watch a good figure skater, it’s almost as if the ice is frozen, but the skater is not. They flow across the ice like water, each movement slipping, dancing into the next. It gives you the same feeling as language beautifully written or music played by a master.

Why do we try to learn new things?

To uncover the weaknesses holding us back.

And hopefully, keep them from being weaknesses going forward.