Learning to ski at 30 is a great exercise in embracing complete and utter lack of control.

Every segment of the skiing experience challenges your ability to let go. To accept that power is a temporary illusion at microscopic scale. There’s the line to rent the equipment that you can’t rush or skip. There’s the ski lift that will keep going whether you’re ready for it or not.

And there’s the mountain itself that only cares about getting slippery things off its face as quickly as gravity allows.

After five minutes on Whistler Mountain, I was about to call it quits and find the nearest bar. I couldn’t stop myself from sliding into the trees without deliberately planting my ass in the snow. I couldn’t turn. And when I fell, I couldn’t stand up again. I could only watch the other skiers in their downhill ballet, which they no doubt learned at the age of five, when you have no fear and an unfair centre of gravity.

It was like one of those nightmares where you try to run away but can’t.

I was halfway down my first run – the easiest on the mountain, according to the map – and didn’t want to keep going.  To continue to the bottom meant another 10 minutes of hard, icy snow on a slope too steep for comfort, which meant more bruises and more fearing for my life. I was stranded,  but Bianca convinced me to go further up the mountain where the snow was fresher. That meant not finishing the run, but clambering uphill, in ski boots, to the gondola. Fifteen minutes of fighting gravity. I was tired, sweaty, discouraged.

We men are especially bad at this. Men define themselves by their physical prowess. We lift heavy objects. We reach high places. We fix things. It makes us feel valuable and useful. Men draw their strength from their strength; we’re meta-Samsons.

Take this strength away and we become bland wads of cottage cheese. That’s why men whine so much when they’re sick. We can’t stand feeling physically weak.

The fresh snow was better, but I wasn’t. I kept trying to remember my first lesson: to turn right, press down with your left foot. Control your speed by turning uphill. It was useless. I just kept getting speed, and more speed meant a bigger concussion when I would inevitably smash into a pine.

A girl skier stopped in front of me as I one again sat mid-slope post-fall, gathering strength like someone about to yank off a sticky Band-Aid.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “I’m scared shitless,” I said. “It’s okay. You just need to relax,” she responded. “When people relax, that’s when they get it.” And off she went.

Lazy advice, I thought. Sounds like any generic self-help hack that appears on Oprah.

As is often the case with clichés, it was right. By my fourth descent down the green run known as Whiskey Jack, I didn’t lose my skis on a nasty stumble. I was going faster knowing I could slow down, even if it meant deploying the ass brakes. During a turn I felt like a street racer on a sideways drift, not a twerp hurtling out of control. I was calmly working with the mountain, not against it.

It’s funny that some skiers talk about taming the mountain. They’re not doing shit to it. It’s been there for millions of years. The skiers tame themselves, their fear, their muscular coordination, their impatience. When everything else is beyond their control, they master the only domain they can.

Clichés have a bad habit of showing up uninvited, and like the girl’s advice to relax, so does this hark back to another tired morsel of popular wisdom: that a person has control over nothing but himself and how he reacts to situations. I didn’t speed up the waiting lines or order the ice to increase its surface friction coefficient.

But each subsequent tumble felt less like a defeat, and more like a tight handshake with the mighty mountain.