Happy Birthday Mao!! You have given such beautiful and inspirational performances that have taught me how to overcome life's difficulties. In them, you have shown the full spectrum of human emotion like the majesty of a mountain range that traverses the deep valley of melancholy before ascending to the peak of jubilation with the levity of a light- hearted smile, then comes your tear jerking skates of redemption- the bittersweet offering in between, which leaves the deepest impression because it is a recipe that combines all life's contrasting ingredients. Thank you for the brave and resilient character you have displayed in the rink. And thank you for showing the lighter side of life in the travel and games shows you have hosted and for your charm and amusement acting as a skating coach for the four stooges and playing ping pong. May you have a long and happy life, with or without competitive skating, though I will miss you dearly if you retire.
Mao shares the same birthday with the great Noble prize winning writer, William Faulkner. I thought I would show how her quotes and skating relate to his.
Mao: April 2013 - I have suffered over the past two years for competitive and technical reasons as well as due to my psychological condition.
William Faulkner: The salvation of the world is through man's (or woman's) suffering.
Mao Asada: Jan, 2013- In order to reach my goal, I have come to accept as unavoidable not being able to turn in a good performance during the competition in front of me.
William Faulkner: All of us have failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
Mao Asada: July 4, 2013- My unchanging objective has been to become a skater who can give small children a dream.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Can't find the quote now, but Mao said that during her Sochi LP, she just concentrated on taking each jump one by one, until she had finally built a monumental performance.
William Faulkner: The man (or woman) who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
When Mao was asked why she included the triple axel in her programs at the press conference in Japan after Sochi, she said that her dream to was to carry on the tradition of her triple axel hero Midori Ito and that it empowers her during her performances. Also, Tarasova said that she had overcome herself in the Sochi LP.
William Faulkner: Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Of course, Mao also broke down her jumping technique and built it from the ground up and finally succeeded in skating the record breaking 8 triple program with level 4 steps and spins.
Faulkner: You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Finally, Mao has held up a mirror to nature with her greatest performances in frozen moments of artistry and athleticism that are worth a gold medal for the soul.
William Faulkner: The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
In addition to William Faulkner, Mao also shares a birthday with the Academy award winning actress and actor (ladies first): Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglass, who are also husband and wife, and the immensely popular African American actor and singer, Will Smith.. Maybe this another reason why Mao is so dramatic in her performances. Perhaps she inherited part of her Russian soul from the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was also born on this day. The great classical pianist Glenn Gould, most famous for his performances of Bach, also shares Mao's birthday.
Mr. Gould is famous for the following quote about the role of the artist which reminds me of the personal effect Mao's performances have on me:
"The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."[46]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Gould
