It was a dark rush to my left as I was walking down Powell Street next to Union Square. I was walking from the office to my shrink appointment, glumly ruminating on everything that I didn’t want to talk about, which said shrink, in all his hatefulness, would gleefully find some way to make me talk about. But anyway, there I was walking along the crowded sidewalk when something rushed past me from behind. I looked to my left and saw nothing. Then I looked straight ahead and saw her.

She was tall and lean and on roller skates. The old-school high-top roller-disco kind with orange wheels. Her long dark hair flew out from under her black helmet as she swerved swiftly with astonishing grace and deftness around the multitude of lumbering pedestrians.

But here’s the thing: she was roller-skating backwards.

She was expertly weaving her course around the zombie-like citizens that crowded the sidewalk, looking back over her right shoulder, tipping a toe down to slow her trajectory, shifting her hips to skillfully circumnavigate a large tourist wearing a fleece emblazoned with the Golden Gate and purchased in Chinatown, surely—backwards.

I stared at her, more amazed than I have been by anything I’ve seen in ages, as she glided (backwards—did I mention that?) down the sidewalk then made a swift turn onto Geary and disappeared.

I was never much of a roller-skater. I enjoyed it mostly and was proficient enough to make the endless circles around the disco-ball-bespangled hardwood at Flippo’s Surfside Skate Rink in Morro Bay to the rockin’ tunes of the greatest hits of the 70s and 80s. But I sure as shit could never skate backwards. I’d carefully watch the skaters who could—their smooth laps of the rink, weaving their feet, one leg crossing rhythmically behind the other, head cocked over a shoulder, glowing feathered hair blowing in the wind of their graceful trajectory. It looked simple enough. But as soon as I turned around to try it, my confidence would plummet; whatever understanding I had about the motion required vanished from my mind, and I’d either fall down or just turn right back around like ha ha, yeah, I meant to do that.

So this woman on the skates was a glorious thing to contemplate. Her utter confidence in her skills was evident and inspiring. I tried to think of how often I undertake anything buoyed by such certainty in my talents; not terribly often, as it turns out. I, like many people, am plagued constantly by self-doubt, self-recrimination. There’s no time to entertain such counterproductive solipsistic thinking when you’ve strapped eight bearing-and-grease-powered wheels to your feet and put yourself at the mercy of gravitational forces for a little spin through densely trafficked urban areas.

But what else to do besides move forward with the faith that I am well-armed with what I need to traverse whatever strange territory presents itself? To live in stasis, paralyzed by the prospect of colliding or falling or otherwise concussing one's person or ego—well. No one worth knowing ever lived like that, did they?