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WHOOOPMH!!! I’m falling backwards, breathless and spinning, hoping my surfboard doesn’t hit me. Now I’m underwater, no idea which way is up. I paddle frantically, tossed around like a rag doll, feeling like I’m running out of oxygen even though it can’t have been more than ten seconds. I grab for my ankle leash and miss as the current spins me again.
Then somehow, my ankle hits the ocean bottom. I flatten out my feet and kick hard against it, and hear the pitch of my bubbling shouts change as I get closer to the surface. Ba-DONK! My head hits my surfboard. I’m too grateful to be annoyed. Wrapping my arm around it, I pull my head out of the water and gasp for breath before I open my eyes, only to find that the chaotic wave that tumbled me like ship-wreckage has turned the top layer of the sea into foam. My throat fills with it, and I start coughing like a hairball-afflicted cat.
I hoist my gratefully un-injured body onto my surfboard, point the nose back towards the ocean, and paddle out.
Twenty seconds before, I’d made a serious miscalculation.
The rogue 7-9 foot wave coming my way looked like it was going to break after it had passed me by. I’d paddled towards it, thinking I’d be able to make it up and over before the wave broke. The wave hit the shallow bottow and doubled over at the last second as I was heading up its face. The top of the wave spilled over. I saw the whitewater coming towards me, felt my body going vertical, and in the split second before I fell, thought: “ouch.”
Cue “WHOOMPH” noise.
The sensation of being picked up and thrown is rare for me. I’m 6’4”, weighing in at almost 200 pounds. No one has picked me up and thrown me since I was a small child. But for the ocean? That kind of strength is a trifle.
I’m surfing on my own now, and I’ve been tossed around more than a few times in the last week. My body is covered in bruises.
When I was first learning, I had an instructor with me who’d tell me when and where to get into a wave, and sometimes even give me a push. Now, I have only my own deeply flawed sense of wave-timing for company.
A perfect storm of inexperience has been brewing the last few days, contributing to my new hobby of pretending to be a sock in a washing machine every day in the ocean. I made two objectively dumb choices:
I bought a smaller board, partly out of naivety, partly out of a desire for convenience. My new, gorgeous board is only two inches taller than I am, meaning that I’ve hopped down from a 9-foot longboard to a 6’6” fishboard, because I didn’t want to carry a 9-foot board around Costa Rica (or keep paying to rent boards). In the five days that I’ve owned it, I’ve stood up on it exactly once, at an easy point break that’s much easier to ride than the beach I’m currently staying at, which brings us to:
I moved to a beach with waves way above my level to practice on a board I don’t yet know how to ride. To quote Allen Weisbecker, author of In Search of Captain Zero:
"I was then and remain the most tiresome sort of male cliche.”
Hubris, hubris, everywhere.
This sensation that you are at the mercy of something much larger than you is why surfing is so healing. In yesterday’s Friday Fun Flier, I included a quote from the documentary Resurface, that focused specifically on surfing’s healing power for sufferers of PTSD:
“You have zero control over the ocean. The only thing you have control over is your attitude and your actions.”
There’s a meditation I like to do whenever I’m in the presence of a waterfall, a river, a mountain, or the ocean. I pick a point and stare, breathe, and focus on the fact that all of what I see was happening yesterday and will happen day after day, week after week, whether I’m there or not.
The ocean’s waves are always pumping. If you choose, you can take a board, hop on a few waves, and then go somewhere else, but the waves will continue all day and all night and on and on until the earth is finished.
Up until a wave is caught, surfing is the greatest demonstration of stoic philosophy I’ve ever seen. You’re out with a relatively flimsy piece of styrofoam in a tiny section of a body of water that borders 47 countries, tasked with riding a few of the millions of waves that crash into the shore every day. The only thing you have control over is how you react. How strong your skills are.
Once you’ve made the choice to paddle out, the ocean will do what the ocean does. You’ve got to do what you know how to do. Go ahead, freak out! You’re still in the ocean. Freaking out will just drown you. Regardless of what waves are coming, you’ve got to stay calm. If the ocean holds you down, you’ve got to get up. That’s all.
Surfing on my own has given me a great gift: it’s reminded me of the power of overcoming fear. In the throes of the depression I was feeling through covid and into the beginning of the summer, I felt flatlined. I wasn’t feeling the extremes of life like I was used to.
Surfing gives you no choice. Adrelanine pumps when waves approach. Fear shows up when they break over you. There’s a tremendous release of dopamine when a wave is caught.
I’m out of the dark and I have the ocean to thank.
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