Surfing Through Life

Life is the one discipline whose experience cannot be beaten. You have to surrender to it.

You can be skilled, determined, stubborn, talented, or even brave, but life and the ocean don’t care. There are days when everything happens in perfect synchronicity, and there are others when we are simply paddling against the current, getting hit on the head by other people’s boards, without the slightest sense of fairness.

We fall and paddle back out to the line-up with hard work, humbly taking our place at the end of the line. Yet, as non-locals, some still imagine that our humility means cowardice.

Life and surfing teach us that the goal is not perfection or dominance, but rather developing a great tolerance for failure. Embracing the role of a stubborn failure and continuing to paddle.

Messing up one pop-up (the movement of getting to your feet on the board) drags us far away from our goal once again, and once again we paddle, our shoulders and lungs burning, wondering: why do we do this?

We think we are better than we were last year, but the ocean reminds us again that there is no ego in this game. Surfing teaches us how important respect, patience, timing, positioning, and courage are.

It also teaches us that if you wait long enough, you will meet the right wave and that nature favors the brave. We also learn that we don’t always get the waves and that our place is not yet anyone’s priority. And with that place comes a huge amount of responsibility, responsibilities that carry the weight of life and can be terrifying.

Those with more experience are responsible for those who don’t have it when an emergency happens. But then, in the middle of all that chaos, we catch one wave that crowns the moment. All the stress releases, and we are once again light, fully ourselves.