Wild Water
When the land is pulled away from under you, tell me—can you still worry about your woes on the water?
Life has surprised me quite a bit recently, with circumstances falling into place like dominoes. I surprised myself on occasion before but never as much as these past few months.
In ‘Zero to One’, Peter Theil talks about asking people an intricate question:
“What’s one thing you fundamentally believe to be true but a lot of people disagree with you on?” I don’t know my answer to it yet, and I have no imposter syndrome leading me to cook up an intelligent sounding answer to the same. I am on the lookout for my answer and that’s enough for me at this point to feel satisfied. But I have an answer, more of a realisation, to another question.
“What one thing you fundamentally believed to not be true but a lot of people disagreed with you on”. It’s a technicality and this one is basically the same question as the above but I needed to phrase it this way to demarcate and distinguish my point.
I believed there was nothing but a fancy luxury to travelling to new places, trying out new experiences. I am not saying it lightly, I believed it in my gut and bones. I conjectured that I could figure out anything that needs figuring out being at one place in life, at least theoretically—optimising every single detail to worldly possible perfection that there would be nothing that could stop the circumstance from eventually conceding to my likening.
And then I tried surfing!
As I was busy squeezing out the most productive solution to my life’s optimisation problems, I had turned a black, blind eye towards the most underrated magic—perspective.
When the land is pulled away from under you, tell me—can you still worry about your woes on the water? I couldn’t.
A surf board and its black Velcro leash tied around the left ankle, its weight in my arm; the water made it tug at me. As I lay on my stomach on the board, back arched, waiting for the wave, I muttered to myself, rather loudly, “arch your back, left leg first, pop up, look where you want to go, you’ve got this”. It’s one of the best talks I’ve had with myself!
Being a beginner at something was an unpleasant experience to me for as long as I can remember. But after this little stint, it’s a road I’m not taking again. As I was paddling on my board, it struck me how enjoyable it is to just do some things, even if you sucked at them at the moment.
Water is a familiar element, one we’re exposed to in a controlled form, day in and day out. But wild water, bigger than you, is something else altogether. You’re at its mercy. Since I’ve never swum in the sea, surfing was a gateway to experience it for the first time. It allowed me to find a way to trust the water. I can feel how different of a person I would be if I did this more often, trying to ride the unpredictable waves, as with life.
As I walked away from the surf, scraped knees, salty hair, sand on my body showing incoming symptoms of various aches, I had never left more alive and energetic. I hadn’t considered myself to be an outdoorsy person, but the sea proved me wrong. There’s so much to it that my mind refuses to believe it inhabits the same world as me and walking by the beach at night, tears welled up in my eyes at the enormity and the incessantness of the waves crashing.
I Go Down to the Shore
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall -
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
Mary Oliver from A Thousand Mornings, 2012
The sea then carried the moonlight to me packaged in a wave and dropped it off at my feet. Maybe, we have a special connection—the water and I, for if not, I would like to be delusional enough to think it anyway!
Note from Naya:
My friend introduced me to Mary Oliver and this particular piece of poetry! Thanks, N, for that and for being so spontaneously fun.
Enjoy my writing? Consider subscribing and sharing it with a friend. Thank you for reading!
Love this! I hope you will surf again. And it's so true about perspective, I am realizing it is so important to be able to look at something in more than just one way.