Learning to Surf: Part II

There are few things that I will wake up at 4:30 in the morning for. Included in these are:

1.) Alien Species landing on my front lawn
2.) Tsunami
3.) Earthquake
4.) To go pee (maybe)

Newly added to the list is surfing. This surprises me. Why would a sane person wake up before the sun to jump into cold water filled with dangerous sharks, coral and stinging jellyfish and then get thrashed about in the water, arms aching from mad paddling?

My only conclusion is that I am not sane. Or there could be more to it.

Surfing in the morning means jumping into the smooth silk ocean before the winds have come up. Sitting on top of my surfboard the sun rises behind the mountains and slowly begins to land itself on my goose flesh skin as I jump on my first wave. As I glide above the water I can look down into the blue sea and watch the coral go skating by underneath me.

Those are great moments. But they are few and far between. It was John Lennon who said "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." I think life is what happens while you're waiting for the next wave.

The act of watching the horizon and sitting in the moment, relaxed but attentive, focused on an ever changing organic mass of thriving energy, is possibly the most healing and connecting thing I can do for myself.

One day I sat there, catching a few waves and then coming back to sit, and I realized I had thought of nothing other than the ocean and the water for the past hour. My mind had gone nearly blank until the thought that I hadn't been thinking popped up.

For those of you who know me well you are well aware that my mind is like a battlefield for analytical warfare where Freud, Jung, and other philosophers engage in a dynamic game of explaining the world and my place in it. These great minds command my attention all day and all night and use so much of my energy trying to make cognitive sense of the world that I often miss out on actually experiencing it.

Surfing is my tool that helps assuage those voices for a brief time. And the satisfaction, the peace and serenity that comes from those in-between-wave moments is better that any extra hour of sleep.

Paddling on...