Skating Through Mid-Life, Maryland and Beyond by Michael Valliant
you start a family; debt builds, you experience loss or uncertainty, lose touch with what your dreams were; put on weight, feel out of shape, feel stuck in whatever you are doing, feel old, or like it’s too late to change or do something different, wonder what happened to the life you pictured long ago. And you freeze, existentially speaking. The answer, for some people, is to do something drastic, impulsive, illadvised, breaking with this strange life they seemed to have stumbled into. In the words of Talking Heads
Warning: skateboarding may help prevent a proper mid-life crisis. Or, at least that’s been what some of us have experienced. At a time when there have been more reasons to be in front of screens, isolated and putting on COVID-19 weight, skateboarding offers a different way of being, connecting to a kind of Zen moment, or childlike wonder, outside. A mid-life crisis can go something like this: after high school or college, you get a job, buy a car, buy a house; maybe you marry, maybe
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