There’s a silence that happens when the ski lift enters the dark. The mechanized wheels churn, people whoop and shout on the lit slopes below, and the trees crackle with shifting ice. The silence isn’t of the moment, it surrounds it like a halo.
It is the same silence that happens when two teams take the field. Time slows. The silence enters through the nose and fills your stomach with tension; then a deep exhale out the mouth blows away all the butterflies.
There’s a silence in the adrenaline blur after you make the steal, after you get past the last defender, after your feet push off against the ground, after you make oh-so-sweet contact with the ball. In that breathless, blurring silence, you know your body is doing something sweet and the flavor of the action expels the pain of training sessions, the smell of your gym bag, and any lingering boredom from hours of daily redundant practice.
There’s a silence that happens when you get close to the top of a trail and the plants get short and the grass reclaims the path where fewer and fewer people pass and your lungs burn, and your legs are jelly and there’s more moisture on your skin than you remember ever drinking. But you pull that silence close and wrap yourself in it, fill yourself with it, remember that you have prepared for it.
And when that silence breaks, you know you will break it with a scream of primal triumph.
This is where I learned to meditate, to breathe. It was on the mountain with skis strapped to my feet. It was on the soccer field with shin guards pressed to my legs. It was in the woods on a trail miles away from any reasonable place of rest.
As I age, I experience that silence less and less on the field and mountain, but I do regularly find it in worship — in the pause between the confession and the assurance, in the inhale before the final verse of the hymn when the pianist takes it up a notch, and in the hush that washes through the sanctuary when the bread breaks.
A life of athletics has taught me to appreciate the negative space that surrounds a physical action. My experience of communal worship is shaped because I was trained as an athlete to notice the moment before the moment, to tend the practices that develop quality, and to always remember to breathe.