After a year of SARS, Mad Cow disease,
hurricanes, blackouts, wars, spam, political realignments, and all
the rest I feel under qualified to make any predictions that would
be half as interesting or dramatic as the real thing.
I mean, who knows what George Bush or Conrad
Black is going to do next? Who knows how to calibrate politics any
more when the leader of the Tory Party is elected with a promise to
reject amalgamation with the Alliance party and accomplishes the
amalgamation before year’s end? What can you say when Ontario has
to elect Liberals to stem the tide of an out of control deficit
authored by right-wing Tories?
These are strange times.
For myself, it has been a great year. We have
celebrated our 30th year in the publishing business in Northern
Ontario, and we intend to go on celebrating in the new year until
we are exhausted.
The older I get, the more I realize it is
important to keep things simple. I have only one resolution this
year. Ski
better.
This of course may appear a modest goal. It is
not. For those of you who know skiing, there is only one issue
-
fear.
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago as I
was doing a 360 at about 30 miles an hour at a far away mountain
in
Utah. What is a 360? Well, in layman’s terms it
means you go head over heals at least once, maybe twice completing
an entire compass full of degrees at a fairly high rate of speed.
It can hurt when you have sticks attached to your feet and poles in
your hand.
In this case I had managed to plant my poles in
front of me in such a way that I catapulted over them knocking the
wind out of my lungs. As I lay on the ground gasping for air, only
too aware of the gathering crowd, there was a part of me wondering
why a 55-year-old man felt the need to actually behave in this
manner.
The introspection soon passed and I determined I
just had to try harder. I did. The next day when I did the same
thing again I managed to bop my lip on the way by and draw a little
blood. Mercifully I was on my own at the time with no witnesses. I
sat there holding a little snow to my lip wondering if the cinnamon
rum (a specialty of the house) which was to come later in the day,
would sting and diminish the joy of drinking rum like it was hot
chocolate.
It did, but it didn’t.
By mid-week, my helpful companions were
considering the establishment of the Atkins Invitational Cup, which
would reward the member of our group with the most points for the
most frequent and artful falls.
It was days before things turned up for me and
others started falling a little more, and I a little less.
One
particularly heart-warming moment came when our
leader and best skier went ass over tea kettle at a high rate of
speed and cut his lip even more than mine. It was annoying,
however, when the judges didn’t feel this warranted a higher score
than my original wind sucking 360. Once you get a rep there is no
justice.
Notwithstanding the bias of my fellow travellers
(most of course, northerners), the thing I like about skiing is you
can’t cheat.
You can’t promise to lower taxes and then raise
them, or quote a price for something, and then nickel and dime on
repairs, or sell a toy and then charge extra for the battery, or
pay yourself non compete fees when you sell assets from your public
company to yourself. You can’t play winter rules when everyone else
is playing summer rules, or take political contributions from
private companies and then sell them government land at a lower
price, or claim weapons of mass destruction when they aren’t there
and you know bloody well they aren’t there.
The Hill is the Hill. You embrace it or fight it.
You love it or fear it and then you just do it.
This year my resolution is to ski better in life
and on the hill.
Michael Atkins is the president of Northern Life.
This column appeared originally in the January issue of Northern
Ontario Business. He can be reached at [email protected].
