Wheels of Fortune and Gratitude

The Wheel

On distance, scarcity, and why some objects never lose their weight

There is a set of wheels in my possession for thirty years at this point that I would only skate on occasionally. The reason is very simple. I cherish them for the history of how I got them in my possession, and I cherish them for the person who gifted them. 

They were made in America. They came to Europe in someone's luggage, many decades ago, wrapped in a T-shirt because there was no other way to protect them. The urethane still surprisingly looks good and potent and still perfectly round after decades. The brand name is stamped on the side. Powell. USA. I have owned many different wheels since. Bigger ones, grippier ones, in different colors and hardnesses. None of them have meant so much as this set. And I want to talk about why, because I think the reason is not sentimentality. I think the reason is physics of a kind — the physics of effort, distance and time, acting on the human nervous system.

 

The World Before the Click

Younger roller skaters will find this difficult to believe, so let me be precise about it. If you lived in Europe in the 1970s, '80s and mid ‘90s, and you wanted something that existed only in America or another part of the world, here is what you did.

First, you found out where it existed. This was not trivial. Information travelled at the speed of print. A magazine arrived at a specialist shop, six weeks after publication, and you looked at a grainy advertisement in the back pages and saw a product you would think about for the next four months. There was no internet. There was no review. There was no unboxing video. There was one photograph, badly reproduced, and a paragraph of copy written by someone trying to sell you something.

Then you found a route. The most common three:

Someone travelled. A cousin in the military. A father on business. A friend of a friend whose neighbour had a sister who was doing a year in California. You gave them a scrap of paper with a name written on it and a folded banknote and you hoped. They came back with the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong size, or — once, gloriously — exactly the thing.

You wrote a letter. An actual letter, to an address in a magazine, containing an international money order you had queued twenty minutes at the post office to obtain. Then you waited. Six weeks. Ten weeks. Sometimes nothing ever came and you never found out why.

You knew a shop owner who knew a guy. This was the aristocratic route. A shop that imported a single box, four times a year, and you were on a list, and being on that list was a form of membership. And then — if the parcel actually arrived — there was the final indignity. The postman at the door, holding your box hostage, wanting import duty in cash before he would release it. I have seen grown men run through a house looking for money, in their socks, because the ordered items were hijacked on the other side of a doorframe.

That was the cost of a thing. Not the price. The cost.

 

The Science of Wanting

Here is what modern neuroscience has clarified about that experience, and it is not what most people assume. Dopamine is not merely the molecule of pleasure. That was the popular story for decades and it was not the full answer to a question no one really asked. Dopamine is the molecule of anticipation — of prediction, of the gap between where you are and where the reward is. It fires hardest not when you receive the thing, but on the approach. In the waiting. In the signal that says: it is coming.

Which means the four months I spent thinking about those wheels were not wasted time before the reward. They were the reward. The nervous system was running its most intense reward machinery the entire time, and the parcel on the doorstep was merely the closing punctuation. Compress that gap to seven days or forty-eight hours and something is lost that no amount of product quality replaces. The anticipation circuit never gets to build. There is no approach; only arrival.

Then add effort. Psychologists have known since the late 1950s that human beings revalue things upward in proportion to what it cost them to obtain them. This is not rational and it is not a flaw; it is one of the most reliable findings in the field. We defend our investment by loving the thing we invested in. Assemble the furniture yourself and you will rate it higher than the identical item bought finished. Suffer to join the group and you will value the membership more. The effort does not merely accompany the value. The effort manufactures it.

And scarcity does its own work. In the classic demonstration, people rated cookies from a nearly empty jar as more desirable than identical cookies from a full one — and when a jar went from full to nearly empty in front of them, the desirability climbed higher still. Rarity is read by the mind as a claim about worth.

Now put those three mechanisms together — long anticipation, high effort, genuine scarcity — and you have described the exact conditions under which a set of urethane wheels becomes something a man will only skate on occasionally thirty years later.

On Skates

Today we can have everything we desire, in a fraction of days, often times hours. That is the part worth sitting with.

Everything is available now. Every wheel durometer, every plate, every boot, every bearing, shipped from anywhere to anywhere, comparison-charted and reviewed by complete strangers, at your door before the week is out. This is for the most part by any honest accounting, a good thing. I would not go back. Access has opened roller skating culture and any other subculture to people who were locked out of it by geography and money, and that matters more than my nostalgia does.

But let's  be crystal clear about the trade. When the gap between wanting and having collapses to nothing, we do not become more satisfied. We become faster and less patient. We buy the wheels, skate them for three sessions, decide the problem was the wheels (which in many cases never is), and buy different wheels. We accumulate gear the way we accumulate browser tabs. Nothing is treasured because nothing was difficult, and nothing was difficult because everything is two clicks away.

I see it on the skate floor and in different roller skate environments. Roller skaters with equipment I could only have dreamed about at their beginner stage or at their skate level, who cannot tell you a single story about any of it. There is no provenance. Nobody carried it across an ocean in a T-shirt.

Here is the part that concerns me more than the gear: the same expectation migrates into the body. Because when everything else in life ships overnight, the nervous system starts to expect that the skating will too. Where is my smooth Cross Over….. Why don't I have the Crazy Legs footwork yet after following the workshop of this super skate influencer…. I have been working on this Slow Walk for two weeks, it still misses swag….. People arrive at the floor with an Amazon Prime model of skill acquisition, but the floor and the rhythm of the groove do not care, and they conclude that they are not in possession of the right gear, rather than just being early and inexperienced.

The magic is in the work being left out

Balance does not have express delivery. Ankle stability does not ship from a warehouse. Nobody has ever imported a hip that tracks correctly under load. There is no route — no travelling cousin, no letter to an address in California, no shop owner with a list — that gets you around the work. The last genuinely scarce thing left in this culture is the thing you built in yourself over years. Which makes it, by every mechanism described above, the most valuable object you will ever own.

Think about what your body actually is, in these terms. It arrived after a long wait. It was assembled through effort — enormous, cumulative, unglamorous effort. It is the only one in existence and it is not replaceable, not at any price, not on any timeline. Every condition that made those old wheels precious applies to it a hundred times over. We just do not treat it that way, because it did not come in a box with a customs sticker on it.

So here is the discipline I would offer.

Let the acquiring of gear be easy — genuinely, gratefully easy. And put the slowness back where it belongs: into the practice. Choose skills you aspire to have and construct a logical breakdown and a careful buildup through a safe and solid training methodology or system. Let the anticipation build. Let the effort accumulate and do its ancient work of manufacturing value. Become someone who experienced patience.

The green Powell USA set sits on a shelf in my home and they are not the most useful object I own. It is the most weighted one. The wheels carry the ocean they crossed, the man who carried them, the woman who gifted them to me, the boy I was when I received them, the first months I spent adjusting my skills to the hardness of the wheels and vice versa.

Build a body that weighs the same. Let that be  the whole aim. It's not about how good you roll. It's all about how long you roll good. Applying patience with gratitude to any of your endeavours will make you grow faster than any other intervention known to mankind.

This story is dedicated to Yvona. This beautiful Queen would light up every scene she appeared at, with her always joyful and colourful spirit. She was also a regular visitor of the Calypso Roller Disco in Rotterdam that existed from 1999 till 2006. Yvona was one of my earliest and biggest supporters to me as a rhythm roller skater and entrepreneur. She went out of her way on a regular basis, to tell me how much she enjoyed my skating and supported the opportunities I created for roller skaters. In the mid 1990’s she came up to me at a roller skate party and told me about a friend who had brought her wheels from the United States. The hardness of the wheels however did not suit her skating. She figured the wheels would be a perfect match for me. I accepted with gratitude and in the following weeks I experienced the full truth in her expectation. She was absolutely right.

I hope to one day pay this gesture forward, so the wheels will roll on, long after I`m gone. But until then, I will keep them rolling every now and then.

With passion, gratitude and dedication,

Brian B. Kanhai 

Soulful Fitness Roller Skate Training®

 

In Loving Memory, Yvona