Why Every Body Needs a Foundation to Fly

When I was in the seventh grade a hurricane hit our state. My mother, fearing our safety, packed us up and drove us to my grandparents’ home. “My father built that place, I know how solid he made the foundation and each and every wall. We will be safer there,” she said.

It was true. The foundation had never leaked in all the years they’d lived in the home. The walls were solid, and my grandfather put up two support beams for every one that was required by state law.

“If the foundation isn’t strong the house can’t stand forever,” he’d say.

In figure skating, many years back, the sport was built on drawing two circles on the ice. Each student had to spend hours tracing those circles, doing different turns, and drawing patterns. You didn’t get to do fancy jumps or spins in competition until you’d spent the hours creating figure eights.

Scoring came from judges getting down on the ice to look closely at which edge you did your turn into and exited. Perfection was key. Figures were the foundation to everything.

Figures no longer have a place in a competitive world of speed, and big rotated jumps. Form isn’t about perfection, but execution.

I started skating as an adult with a famous Russian coach. He told me that if I wanted to jump and spin I could simply go to someone else, but if I wanted to learn an art form, then he was willing to build my foundation. It meant hours of doing exercises no one else did. While my other adult friends were excited about learning the axel or a new spin, I was pumping around a circle still on both feet building up the body alignment and strength.

My jumps, when I was finally allowed to do them, came fast, in fact within one lesson, but it was many months before they were even asked of me.

For years I haven’t been with my coach. A car accident, injuries, and life, took me away from him. I found other wonderful coaches and I began to skate the American style way of learning edges and turns, called Moves In the Field.

The test I’m now working on, stops most skaters, and I’ve spent years in frustration as I’ve been unable to get it to the point I can test. One day, a skater, who was trained almost solely by a Russian coach taught me a simple exercise.

It looks so simple; make small circles on all eight edges and use the blade to keep the circle small. At the level I skate, this should be easy. It wasn’t. All the bad habits I could hide within speed, were now apparent. The foundation my first coach had given me, had been lost in impatience.

By returning to that foundation, and patching it up, everything began to change. Now each day I spend ten minutes making small circles on all 8 edges and finding my foundation before anything else.

As I made the circles, and I thought about my grandfather’s house, I wondered at the foundations we’re building of our human lives.

Instant gratification has become our way of life. We want to lose those ten pounds in three weeks. Get rich as quick as possible. People swipe for love and build relationships off of text messages, followed by sex. Later if neither person has ghosted the other within a month, then you get to know each other further. Foundation of romance, and time spent together is a thing of the past.

Skincare, look for the instant results of a lunchtime face lift or injections.

Filters on Instagram and Tik Tok, we look amazing.

Look my kid is working on her axel and her double toe loop. Doesn’t matter that she can barely skate around the rink. She’s a super star.

Write a book and publish, becoming a bestseller on Amazon within three months or less or use AI to write it for you.

In aerial, try a drop or advanced move before you’ve even learned how to activate your body.

The list goes on.

No one wants to feel the hardship of the long journey — the unknown if they will succeed.

Everyone wants the big gain, the goal achievement. You just have to manifest it, visualize it, and have it magically happen. If it’s hard, then it’s time to walk away. And those we watch struggle, we wonder at their failures, and why they’re willing to keep going.

I’ve spoken with countless people who want to write a book. Friends suggest to them that they speak to me because I’m published with Simon & Schuster. I hear the same words each time, “I’m almost done with the first draft and it’s ready to be shown to agents.”

“Call me when you’ve done your seventh draft,” is always my response.

“Well that would take too much time, and I really hate editing because I don’t know grammar. I know this is meant to be a bestseller.”

“Wait, you want to be a writer but you have no foundation for the skill? Thinking it’s going to be a bestseller, is like going to Google and wanting to be the CEO because you’ve used the search engine.”

Ask any person with full self-confidence, and surety about life, who’s had any type of success, and they will say to you, “I failed. I fought. I let it all build me. I went back and I learned. Then I fell again. The foundation fell down many times, but once it was solidly built the right way, the house looked to everyone else like overnight success.”

If you ask a couple who’s made it to sixty years or more of marriage, they will answer, that it took hard work, compromise, but they got through it because they had a strong foundation of friendship, respect, honesty and values.

It’s hard to not gravitate to the diet that makes you pee out the pounds and feel lighter within days. It doesn’t make us happy to give up the drugs that give reprieve, without work, from the daily stresses, and make happiness just another hit away. It’s tempting for single people to keep swiping to feel the exhilaration of new possibilities instead of building foundations with someone that would make them grow as a person.

In marketing, if a company promises results that are a year away, no one would buy their product. Instead, they have to make the claim that it will happen within moments or days.

We keep trying to put the roofs to our happiness without building the floors, and as a society we’re the unhappiest and the most anxious we’ve ever been as a whole, when we should be celebrating all that we have — more than any other generation before.

Does the wisdom of our happiness and success lie in the foundation that our grandparents and great grandparents knew how to build? If we went back to teaching foundations, of the long process, and the journey, would we build something for the future within our relationships, health, minds and emotional well-bing? Or have we gone so far away from that ability, that we will only continue to go for bigger, faster, better, instant, and always be searching for satisfaction, but never achieving it?