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When I tell people surfing is life . . . it’s difficult to get past the image of Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That it sounds like a clichéd joke, however, does not negate its truth. The cycles of the seascape are as mercurial as life. Like life, sometimes you can’t seem to ride the easiest stuff the ocean throws at you, while other times you’re holding on for dear life to something you suddenly regret having asked for. Almost everything in my life seems to correlate to surfing on some level.
Don’t get me wrong. I suck at surfing. Big time. When you look at surfers, I’m that board you see fly up in the air without a rider when the wave curls. But I love it, and wiping out on a wave beats walking perfectly on the sidewalk any day. While I often fail at the sport, the metaphor never does. There is something about the simplicity of being alone on the water that brings focus to what is truly important. No cell phones. No reading material. No distractions. Just a swimsuit, a rash guard, and a board. When your set rolls in, you ride it. When it doesn’t, you just float. Every morning holds the promise that something special might happen.
I remember one special day. It was late September. Cocoa Beach. The ocean was rolling one to two footers at best, and so all there was to do was sit and talk to the other surfers next to me. It became this floating neighborhood of new friends. Many came and went. A few remained and by the time the sun lowered in the late afternoon sky, they seemed like old friends. I was there for the long haul—from sunrise to sunset with a quick run to MacDonald’s for lunch. Mostly I just sat and looked at the strip of land that was the edge of everything I knew. It was all over there—where I could see it, but where it couldn’t touch me. My legs dangled through the ceiling of another universe that I could not see. After a while, I started to wonder why I was still hanging there with no waves. The day was becoming a disappointment. I stayed nevertheless. Maybe it was the peace. The mental reboot. Perhaps the conversations. Or maybe it was just sitting fully in nature’s palm, looking at the edge of the continent from its fickle whim. Nothing was going as I had either planned or hoped. Yet the solitude was more than pure. It was organic.
Boredom didn’t matter. Fear didn’t matter, and neither did my expectations. All that mattered was that I was present.
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A thrashing commotion about twenty yards off my right shoulder caught our attention, a large, shiny gray flash visible in the splash. It was a very large creature – perhaps a shark, or something trying to swim away from a shark, telling me that maybe I should, too. Oddly enough, I wasn’t scared. Nor was the surfer next to me. It wasn’t that I was brave because I wasn’t. I just wasn’t frightened. That often happens when I paddle out. For some reason, those fears never get on the board with me, although I’ve never figured out why that is. Fright stays crumpled on the beach with my towel and sometimes greets me when I come in. “You forgot to take me with you. Was that smart?”
So we watched this shiny gray flash churning the water. In a starburst moment, two dolphins fully breached in a graceful tandem arc like a SeaWorld show. Unlike SeaWorld, they were wild and free and so close I could almost touch them. We just sat there in stunned fascination.
The reason I thought I was there for suddenly didn’t matter. The lack of ridable waves didn’t matter. Boredom didn’t matter. Fear didn’t matter, and neither did my expectations. All that mattered was that I was present. If I were allowed to take ten days of my life with me when I die, that would be one of them.
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