I keep my board close. Not in a closet, not in the car. Close. Near the door, within reach. Because the window for skating is usually small and unannounced. The light is right, or the parking lot is empty, or something in the day needs to be interrupted. You have to be ready.

I have been skating since I was a kid. That is a long time to do something and still be average at it. I am not working toward a level I haven’t reached yet. I have reached my level. I live there. Most days that is fine with me.

That probably sounds like giving up. It isn’t.

Skating is not the only thing I am average at. It is just the most honest example. I do a lot of things. I am competent at most of them. Somewhere between beginner and mastery is where I seem to live across the board.

There is a version of that which looks like a lack of commitment. I understand why. The people who go deep into one thing develop something that people who go wide never quite get. A fluency. A certainty. An identity built around being the person who does that one thing better than almost anyone.

I don’t have that. What I have instead is range. A way of moving through the world that keeps more doors open than it closes. Whether that is good or bad depends on what you are trying to do. Some days it feels like freedom. Some days it feels like I am standing in the middle of a lot of things without being rooted in any of them.

I am still figuring out which is which.

The things that kept me in skating were never the things that were supposed to keep me in it. It wasn’t progress, or community, or identity, though all of those showed up eventually. It was simpler than that. When I am skating, I am not thinking about anything except what is directly in front of me. The surface, the speed, the weight of my body over the board. There is nothing else to manage. The part of my brain that runs the background processes, the plans, the decisions I haven’t made yet. Goes quiet. Completely quiet.

That is rare. I don’t know anything else that does it as completely.

There is also something specific about how skating handles failure. Most things you practice long enough and failure becomes less frequent. You get competent, the hard parts get easier, the falls stop. Skating doesn’t work that way. You fall constantly no matter how long you’ve been doing it. A beginner falls. A professional falls. The level changes but the falling doesn’t. You just get better at falling, and better at getting back up, and better at deciding what to try next.

That normalizes something most people spend their whole lives trying to avoid. Failure stops being a signal that you’re doing something wrong and starts being just part of the process. Every session. Every time.

I think that’s part of why it stays with me. It keeps teaching the same lesson at every level. You are not done falling. You are never done falling. The question is just what you do after.

Average in practice looks like this: I show up, I skate, I try things that seem fun, I don’t keep score. There are no goals I am working toward. No trick I am determined to land before I let myself enjoy the session. No benchmark I have to hit before the day counts.

That sounds simple. It isn’t. Most people who pick up skating want to get good at it. They measure sessions by what they landed and what they didn’t. Progress becomes the point and when progress stalls the motivation goes with it. I did that for a while too.

At some point I stopped. I’m not sure exactly when. The goal became something different. Not no falling, not landing more, not getting to the next level. Just not thinking too much. Just being in the thing without needing the thing to produce something.

That is harder to hold onto than any trick. The mind wants to evaluate, to compare, to measure. Skating gives it something physical enough to occupy it completely. When it’s working you’re not thinking about anything. You’re just there.

That’s what I show up for. That’s always been what I show up for. I just didn’t have the words for it for a long time.

There is something else about skating that most people never think about and that skaters rarely talk about directly.

Your body learns a stance. Regular or goofy, one foot forward, one foot back, weight distributed in a way that starts to feel like the only way. You skate enough and it becomes automatic. Natural. You stop thinking about it entirely.

That muscle memory feels like progress. It isn’t, or at least it isn’t only that. It is also a ceiling.

Skating has orientations. Fakie is your natural stance reversed, rolling backward, your body facing the wrong way relative to your direction of travel. Nollie shifts the pressure to the nose, changes the relationship between your feet and the board entirely. Switch puts you in the mirror of your natural stance, everything you know flipped. Each one is a different body, a different weight distribution, a different conversation between you and the ground.

Most skaters develop a home. A stance they live in, a few others they visit. The home stance becomes unconscious and unconscious movement is where the limitations hide. You stop choosing how you move. The habit chooses for you.

I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to not have a home stance. To be genuinely comfortable in all of them, not just functional but present, not just executing but aware. Stanceless not as a trick count but as a state of attention. Every orientation deliberate. Nothing on autopilot.

That is harder than learning any individual trick. It requires you to keep noticing something your body is actively trying to make invisible. The body wants to automate. Skating keeps asking you to stay awake.

That is still what I am working on. Probably always will be.

I don’t worry about putting it down. Skateboarding will be there when I come back. It always has been. The only thing that ends it is the body, and I’m not there yet.

I am average on a skateboard. I will probably be average on a skateboard for the rest of my life. Afternoons, evenings, whatever parking lot is available, the sound of wheels on pavement and whatever else is happening around it.

That is enough. That has always been enough. I just needed enough time to understand that the point was never the level I was going to reach. The point was the showing up.

I show up. I always have my board near me just in case.