If you choose to paddle out, there’s a guarantee you’ll feel better after. Photo: Murray Ralfe
Over the first weeks of this freshly waxed year, I’ve been thinking a lot about hope. Maybe it’s because the holidays arrive like a raging blizzard, then leave us stranded amid empty, gray-blue skies and colder temps, everyone retreating to their separate igloos. Maybe it’s spending fleeting time with nephews on the East Coast who are full of youth and life, then finding out other family members are struggling as the talk goes late into the night, the wine is poured, the candles flicker.
As a full-time freelance writer, a lot of what I do hinges on the fundamental tenet of looking ahead. My grandfather, who emigrated from Portugal, used the saying sempre para frente or “always forward” to make disappointments – a lost soccer game, a bad test, a losing Red Sox season – seem surmountable. Still, I’m old enough to have seen a lot of my peers (writers, painters, musicians, etc.) give up on their dreams.
That’s not a self-congratulatory pat on the back, because sometimes what I do each day feels hopeless. We all have our struggles, but overall, I try to dwell less on the rejections than the projects that inspire me. Music producer Rick Rubin speaks often of the idea of the art being the focal point when making things. Not the audience, not the success or failure of a given idea. Only the essence of what is being created.
Which leads me back to surfing. Surfers often have their best days when no one else is watching. No cams, no partners on the beach, no crew to hoot and holler. Just a board, a beach, a wave.
I’m old enough and just wise enough to know that I will never be an outstanding surfer. I’ll ride as many waves as I can and work hard on the craft; but I started late, and I have always had more of a knack for skating, snowboarding, and soccer – all three of which I fell into well before the age of eight.
I love watching great surfing, but I don’t have much interest in following it as a sport – in many ways, watching contests feels anti-climactic. To me, surfing is an escape, a way to commune with nature and enjoy the power of the ocean while revisiting my skating days – and when I fall, it’s typically easier on my body than a handrail or stair set.
I get chills watching big-wave surfers conquer towering sets at Maverick’s and Nazare, but those extremes feel alien when compared to my daily sessions. Plus, my creative work, relationships, goals, and the stubborn disc in my back might preclude me from moving to Hawaii and spending three sessions a day getting in the zone.
Notice I said “might.”
Yet, all of this is incidental, because I freakin’ love surfing and I’m lucky as hell to get to do so often. As we get older, many of us are unable to do the things that provide pure joy. The reasons for this are endless: jobs, family commitments, societal constraints, public opinion, injuries and so on. Realizing this makes me appreciate every session, and surfing’s addictive properties keep me going back for more. In fact, I realized yesterday that my default expression when I’m out paddling around is a smile. This coming from a guy who’s written about 100 sad songs.
In his memoir, Barbarian Days, William Finnegan writes that his “…utter absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder in it.” Like Finnegan, I feel that the enigma of surfing is offset by the beauty of its simplicity. That there is much to love even without counting the ephemeral seconds spent in the parallel universe that occurs when you walk on water.
Even on its worst day, surfing is rife with sensory overload. The sunrise, an empty beach, the cool sand underfoot as you size up the swell and pick your spot. The smell of wax, the feel of your board under the arm, the snugness of the leash around your ankle. The thrill when you zip up your suit and jog to the water: you’re now committed. Something mysterious is going to happen, and it could zap you with dopamine and serotonin and leave you buzzed all day.
See, surfing is all about looking forward.
Surfers, from groms to kooks to seven-year-old prodigies to 75-year-old loggers, literally hang their wetsuits on hope. Our entire pursuit is predicated on looking ahead to the next wave, set, swell running up the coast. When we trudge out of the sea after a tough day, we speak only of redemption sessions.
Surfers’ eyes stick to the horizon, to the ever-changing medium of the sea. How will it transform in the next minute, hour, night? When are we getting up, what boards should we bring, how cold is the water, who’s coming? The endless scroll of questions propels us forward.
Always, forward.
Of course, when we’re racing to duck dive a set or flying across the face a wave, we’re more in the present than seems humanly possible. When we’re paddling out, eyes peeled, we’re more alive than we are for the rest of the day. Suddenly, we have the superhuman power to block out all our other nagging thoughts.
Don’t get me wrong: surfing is far from perfect. Many sessions do not live up to our expectations, or the surrounding hype. You’re up at 3 a.m., driving hours to find only ankle high rollers and a guy in the lot screaming “I woke up, for this?!” (True story). You’re cut off again and again because no one knows etiquette anymore. You fight your way out the back on a big day just to get crushed on your first drop and driven down into the cold, unforgiving depths (another true story). We know that the ocean doesn’t give a shit about our lives. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.
Yet when we leave the reef with bloody feet or blown out shoulders, we still innately know that we will paddle out again. How many things leave us gasping and defeated and bloody, and then suck us back in for entire lifetimes?
I’ve gotten into my car, shivering, and told myself that I need to take a few days off, that my back is tweaked, that I’m not surfing well and I’m wasting time when I could be reading or researching or actually writing…and then by the time I get home I am 100 percent certain that I’ll be out there in the morning grabbing the first wave I see by the fist.
We’re a unique breed, and once this feeling of optimism is in your blood, it can’t be shaken. It’s with you for the rest of your life. Each session brings a fresh transfusion.
In a world full of negative news cycles, this kind of stoke nearly feels forbidden. I’m a realist and fully aware of the problems our nation and our world face daily, from poverty and hunger in countries rich and poor to the environmental crash course we’re on that runs on collective apathy, and so on with a list that could echo for days.
Yet, good things also happen each day, and we don’t speak of them enough, never mind dwell on them.
Always, forward. Sempre para frente, as wise old Joaquim used to say. My grandfather may not be around anymore, but I still hear his voice.
Here’s to one hell of a swell-filled and overly optimistic 2024.
Wait, is it too late to say “Happy new Year?”
