What was it that you gave up on after a few tries believing there was no point in trying further?

Slacklining.

My son got me up on the damned thing a few weeks ago, My leg oscillated like a thing possessed, just as he’d told me it would. The few times I actually let go of his shoulder (he was walking alongside me), I was quickly catapulted off to the side.

My son assured me that after a couple of dozen tries, my brain would figure out how to dampen the oscillations, and I have no reason to doubt that. But weighed against the prospect of 3 weeks in a cast, it just didn’t seem worth it. I’m playing the age card more and more often these days.

Skate boarding. Never got my balance.
Those shoes with wheels so you can skid across the floor. I couldn’t even stand up in them when I tried them on.
Doing the splits in dance class.
I was too late. In my next life I’ll start no later than age 10.

Knitting with spaghetti.

One particular relationship. I can’t believe I gave it as many tries as I did, to be honest. I gave up because, eventually, I dragged my dignity out of my ass.

William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch

Reading James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, learning classical Greek.

Silkscreening

You might enjoy surfing @gailcalled.

It takes a Bard to explain a Bard.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies: That YouTube is over two hours long. But thanks for thinking of me.

I have tried several times to paint landscapes, but failed.

” ...last and most puzzling work of the British writer, James Joyce…,” @0:00:05 of Surfing.

Here that? That’s the sound of Joyce rolling in his grave—all the way from Zurich.

Salomon…in water skiing. I was young, athletic, able to master everything I did…except that. I don’t understand why to this day.

Also, reading War and Peace. I gave about 4 runs at it. The best I ever managed was to read the Peace parts and skip the War parts.

@Espiritus_Corvus: I did listen to 6 minutes of Terence McKenna’s bloviation on Finnigan’s Wake, but that was even more impenetrable than the first 25 pages of F’s W. He describes the book as; “daunting, linguistically dense, barely in English, psychedelic, apocalyptic, eschatological, swirling, disjointed boundaries, unlinear time stream, and exegesicsl,’” to select a few. He also mentions that the book is 63,000 words. I wonder who first counted them? The same guy who first ate a lobster?

Riding a unicycle. I was too old and out of shape for a beginner, but I loved the idea of it.

Actually when I really want to do something I usually end up mastering it. The catch is that I must be motivated enough to get good at something, or I’d likely tire of the repeated failure eventually. In sticking with the spirit of the question I’d say performing cartwheels comes to mind, but I was usually good at doing front and back flips ironically.

Skiing
I don’t know if it was because I was too tall/big for the skis I had on, but I could not stop. I used to roller blade a lot when I was younger so skiing came natural to me, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t come to a stop on the slope, forcing me to crash everytime.

^^ You mean that there are other ways to stop? Now you tell me.

When I was still stupid enough to down-hill ski, I found that I could do a perfect parallel turn to the left and became a spastic stumble-bum when trying to turn to the right. I never did figure it out. I ended up each day on the slope with a bruise the size of dinner plate on my right thigh.