Photo: Brendan Simmons
“It feels like riding on a tiger,” my five-year-old son exclaimed after catching his first wave. It was one of his most natural outbursts. Pure elation.
At that stage, I had never surfed and his following descriptions seemed so vivid and pure:
“It feels like being in a tree and getting blown all around.”
“It feels like the window blinds when you let go and it flies up really fast.”
“It feels like riding on a bird.”
“It feels like you’re running away from a car going really fast.”
Now we are a surfing family with some of our best times together spent waiting for and chasing waves.
“Mum, you dropped in on me,” my daughter will admonish me some days as if she hasn’t caught a thousand more waves than me in her life. My son takes wave after wave as I paddle onto another face only to be brushed off by a 12-year-old.
I am a late starter. A post-forty mum in a steamer. A few Christmases ago, the kids and bloke got me a sealed, long sleeve, long leg wetsuit. Some days I come out of the water and my bathers are still half dry underneath. It’s a revelation.
But the greatest revelation is the sense of happiness mixed with calm and exhilaration, all brought on by floating on my fiberglass 7’4″ and scanning the horizon for waves. Some days it’s grey and the sky looms heavy above us. Rain falls with slow drops, but on those days the waves are clean and uncrowded, and the four of us surf til we are too tired to push ourselves up, then run for the carpark as the storm breaks.
Other days, we might fight for space at a popular point break, watching hipsters and old dudes catch multiple waves on their longboards in the warm NSW coastal water. Or we go further afield while camping and surf our biggest waves ever, finishing off with wipeouts, a campfire, and a sausage.
Initiatives in the UK have explored the benefits of surfing for those suffering depression or low self-esteem, with programs focusing on disadvantaged kids. While the data cannot claim direct effect, researchers do talk about the feelings of stoke — that feeling of physical and spiritual life-force recharging us. New York scientist Zenven Wu, in an interview with Tim Baker, links stoke to the negative ions formed through the interaction between water and oxygen, for example, breaking waves. Negative ions are said to help elevate mood and produce increased serotonin levels.
Closer to home, non-profits like One Wave depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorders. Their belief is that all it takes to give you hope is have that “feeling of being on a wave, letting everything go and enjoying the moment.”
And in my own experiences since that first time my five-year-old proclaimed he’d just ridden a tiger, I’ve learned that even the simple sound of water slapping at the base of my board is music to my ears. I know that being in the ocean brings a calm sense of contemplation mixed with fierce purpose. I’m not too fussed about getting the most waves — though my children are — I am just happy to be paddling, bobbing, striving, and sometimes flying.
When we think of the “Zen of Surfing,” the experience of riding the waves and dealing with chaos can help people manage the emotional challenges of life and death, or samsara. This is how I have felt recently, as I navigated the grief of my father’s death. As the horrendous hand of grief would come to strangle my throat and the fingers grab at my intestines, my mind would hold fast to the mantra “little waves, little waves.” It’s a call to calm that we have used with the kids over the years. It’s like breathing, the inevitable cycle of in and out, of the coming and the going, the push and the pull, the force and the froth, and the subsequent calm — we can make sense in these moments when we breathe through the turmoil and take off. Just like riding on the back of a bird.
