According to the Derridean definition, binary opposites refer to the coexistence of two opposing phenomena within the same individual or circumstance. We can experience one extreme of a situation within a brief period of time, while another person might live it in a completely different way.
In Western thought, we establish pairs of binary opposites in which we privilege one over the other. What makes them opposites is that they cannot coexist. We conceive the good and the bad of our skiing, the weather, the slopes, the terrain, or other skiers as opposites. We can suggest that the action of moving across snow is a combination of approach and avoidance of the slope. Skiing is, at the same time, a constant equilibrium between letting oneself glide and braking to control that very same glide, given that controlling is, in part, braking by resisting gravity.
Regarding balance, we encounter a paradox: we find it only to lose it. Instead of constantly seeking balance, would it not be better if we tried to control unbalance? The other paradox relates to gravity, in that the very same gravity we exploit to glide is the one we resist when fear surfaces.
When skiing, there is no unity without duality, nor duality without unity, even though most of the time we ski with a dual consciousness. Everything moves in rhythmic cycles with a constant oscillation. While skiing, we experience a steady rhythm of compensations and excesses that disrupt our balance, giving rise to moments of advance and retreat, ascent and descent, and a pendular movement, since the measure of our movements to one side must equal the movement to the other.
The two opposites we face regarding external forces are resisting them or exploiting them. The most widespread duality characterizing good skiers is letting go and flowing, whereas those identifying ordinary skiers are controlling and suffering.
Some of the contradictions we face as skiers include: having to descend the slope but also avoiding slipping; utilizing gravity but refusing to suffer it; controlling the glide or letting it control us; using diagonals or linking turns; experiencing the pleasure of looking or the fear of seeing.
Other opposing concepts included in our domain encompass the notions of good and bad, success and failure, adequacy and inadequacy, losing and recovering balance, efficient and inefficient skiing, reactive and proactive, process and outcome, chronological time and psychological time, internal and external forces, beginning and end, contraction and relaxation, flexion and extension, accelerating and decelerating, rising and sinking, uphill and downhill, skidding and carving, skeletal stacking, rotation and counter-rotation, and muscular bracing, and thinking and feeling.
This philosophical examination mirrors the pendular nature of skiing. We cannot have a left turn without a right turn as well as we manage the unbalance, rather than the pursuit of static stability. In the phenomenology of the slope, unity is born from duality. The skier exists in a state of perpetual paradox: finding balance only to lose it, exploiting gravity while resisting its pull, and utilizing physical contraction to achieve mental liberation. To ski is to embrace this pendular rhythm, transforming the tension of opposing forces into a singular, harmonic descent.
