It’s humiliating to watch people younger than you do something better than you. I’ve rarely had to deal with this issue because I’m a youngest child. But standing at the top of a mountain, heart in my mouth as I face the reality of hurtling down a vertical slope, my fear quickly became dwarfed by the embarrassment of watching children half my height flying down on their skis. No flinching, no hesitation. I was left at the top, staring out at the Tyrol mountains and realising I was considerably out of my depth.
If you count the day when a Swiss friend tossed me down a slope and assured me I’d figure it out on the way down, this was my second time skiing and it was quickly looking like it would be my last. Unlike my boyfriend, who first took to the slopes when he was four, I hadn’t grown up going to the mountains.
This is an issue because you have to start young, apparently. You have to learn when you have no sense of fear and there’s less of a distance to fall. Fully grown and fully aware of how many bones I could break if (when) I crash, I was more hesitant to fling myself down the mountain.
But as I watched an instructor cross the slopes, like a mother duck being tailed by a long line of little ducklings, I became quite jealous of the fearlessness of these children who approached it with so much gusto and so little apprehension. Making their way down the slopes, laughing and singing, it seemed there was little that could faze them, or slow them down.
I considered myself quite outdoorsy, with annual camping trips and a solid collection of wellies. But then I met the Austrians. Devouring hearty meals before hurtling back out into the cold to cross-country ski, ice skate or sledge, they seemed to have boundless energy and, along with that, a boundless capacity for perseverance.
In 2021, cases of severe depression in the UK were four times higher than in Austria. There are still concerns over high levels of mental health issues among young people in Austria, but levels of anxiety are still noticeably lower in teenagers than in the UK.
With such an outdoorsy spirit, it’s not hard to see what they’re doing right. They’ve instilled in their kids a resilience and bravery that goes beyond emotional, mental or academic comfort. Life has many challenges, but if you are throwing yourself down a mountain, you don’t have time to think about anything else. It takes some guts to not just do that, but to relish it. I felt positively inspired to face the new year.
Having become accustomed to seeing young ski schools zoom past, headed for the trickier pistes, it was a comfort to come across a British dad teaching his young son to ski on a family run, even more so because the child was giving voice to my internal fears: “no, this is really fast” and “no, I really can’t do this”. It seems foolhardiness isn’t a given in the young. But by the end of the day, I spotted them again, skiing more confidently. He might not have had the carefree tenacity of his Austrian counterparts, but he, too, had a perseverance I couldn’t help but respect.
On one of my earlier runs, I lost confidence and swerved into a mound of snow. With stubborn determination, I insisted that would be the last time I tried skiing and melodramatically declared that I would simply have to walk down. But as another troop of young skiers flew by unperturbed, I realised that was not the Austrian (or safe) way.
Inspired and humiliated by the grit of the local skiers, I persisted. If I’m bringing anything into 2025, I hope it will be that same daring resilience – along with a mildly bruised ego.
Abigail King is a journalist living in Edinburgh