When you start skateboarding, there are two "basic" techniques that loom in front of you as gateways into "actually skating:" the ollie and the drop in. For competent skaters, these are so foundational that on their own they don't really qualify as tricks. But if you can't do them yet, they seem basically impossible.
An ollie is a complicated set of motions that you need to carry out not-quite simultaneously. It's really difficult, and I can't do it yet. But a drop-in is just falling through the air and catching yourself when you land. I can drop in,1 and learning how to do it led me to think more about faith than I have in my entire life up to now.
The specific discipline that requires a drop in is called "transition," as in, transition from a horizontal to a vertical surface, like the curve from the bottom to the side of a swimming pool. In order to drop in, you jut your board out from the edge into empty space like a diving board, or a pirate's plank. Below it is a curve of concrete that starts impossibly steep, and ends up totally flat. Once you step on the front of your board, it'll start falling towards that concrete, and at some point your wheels will make contact. That all makes sense.
But where in that transition will they hit, and how will your body respond to that when it happens? Presumably if you've dropped in hundreds of times, you basically know the answer to that question. The first time you drop in, you DEFINITELY do not. For this reason, it's much less frightening to drop in on a bank (that is, a flat incline). You know what angle your wheels will hit, because it's the same all the way down to the flat. Even so, dropping in on a bank the first time is, itself, terrifying. There's no way to ease into it—in fact, the standard advice is to slam your front wheels down as hard as you can, so that you don't fall backwards onto the edge. That is to say, the scariest of several possible outcomes is the one that happens if you're too tentative. Which brings me to faith.
I haven't thought about "faith" much in my life. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and my own theological feelings were best encapsulated by the seventh Unitarian Universalist Principle: "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." I felt like I believed in a "God" but not a personified deity—basically, I believed in "the force" as described by Obi-Wan Kenobi: "It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."2 This still pretty much covers my religious belief. And while it has a lot to recommend it (apart from anything else, it's what I actually believe in), one notable thing it has going for it, as I think about it now, is that my faith is never going to be let down by it.
And my approach to learning to drop in was to minimize the need for faith by moving as gradually as possible: first, just learn the motion on flat ground. Then find the most gradual incline I could, and work up from there. I actually found two local skateparks with spots that got incrementally steeper and taller as you went around them (shout out to Ocean Beach and Memorial Skateparks), and inched my way around them. But no matter how gradually I progressed, there would be a gap that required faith to cross: my board jutting out into space, the concrete angle of the concrete looking impossible to land on, and I'd need to step out into the void.
Now, the internet has lots of advice on dropping in. A common theme is that it's "all mental" and the most important thing is to "just commit." This seems to carry an implication that as long as you conquer your fear and commit to the drop in, everything will be OK.
This is not the case: last year I had two sprained MCLs that say that you can fully commit to dropping in, and really hurt yourself.
Here's the thing that dropping in taught me about faith: if you try the scary thing and fully commit to it, you MIGHT hurt yourself. But if you try to do the scary thing and don't commit to it, you will DEFINITELY hurt yourself. In other words, faith is no guarantee of success, but doubt is a guarantee of failure.
This also comes up in rock climbing, where "trust your feet" is a common mantra. This sounds great until somebody tells you to actually kick leg out and plant your entire weight on a tiny bump of rock, which, if it DOESN'T hold you, will mean you crash into the side of a rock face. As you may guess, I'm thinking of a specific situation here, and all I could think at the time was "I know for a FACT my foot might slip, why the hell should I trust something that I KNOW might fail?"
Having faith in things that aren't a sure bet doesn't come easily to me, and I continue to hate it. Unfortunately, as it turns out, faith in uncertain circumstances isn't, as I assumed most of my life, optional. You need to have it if you're going to find a soft landing. And sometimes you won't find a soft landing, anyway.
1. On some things, as long as they aren't too tall or too steep
2. I've been revisiting Star Wars with my children and as an adult I find that almost all the cosmology and morality is ill-conceived and incoherent, but I think they really nailed it with this basic idea (not original to Star Wars obviously, but that's where I first encountered it as a young child).