Surfing Through Life

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for FijiRen

Once when I was feeling depressed, on a morning like many mornings, I was walking down my driveway to pick up the newspaper waiting for me out near the street. That is a lovely walk for me to make every day, because of the mystery hidden inside the folded up newsprint. It is delivered personally to me every day, by a human being that I know only through the contact he made in getting my paper to me. From his hand to mine.

On that morning I was not feeling so lovely, but walked with heaviness and a downcast disposition, as the waves of my recurring sadness washed over me. In some ways I am thankful for these waves, and wonder if God has given me the gift of my brain illness so that I can better appreciate how to ride the waves we must in this life.

Maybe sucking up some foam and getting rolled around by the arms of a wave is just the thing I need to remind me how lucky I am that I can ride most of the time. Maybe every time I start to drown in an undertow and get pulled out to sea I remember what I did before, and swim sideways and back into the shores of my life.

The waves of our lives remain more consistent than we think, but how we ride them changes, sometimes daily or by the hour. Or even moment by moment. An experienced surfer can ride even the largest waves with absolute safety and sheer joy, turning the power and strength of the wave into purpose and speed and life. But the inexperienced surfer will flounder and flail his way through the waves, getting knocked about as he struggles to get beyond the break and out to the launching place where other surfers line up and prepare to board their personal water trains back to shore.

Then it's our turn and we are so frightened.

The waves are huge and scary and we've never before tried to surf anything that large. Or perhaps the size remains the same but our fear has made the waves bigger in our psychosomatic version of reality. Our courage has been eaten by the sharks that swim the canyons of our soul and we imagine exactly how we will die when we dare to defy the dark waves speeding past us. How can we possibly align ourselves and become one with them without being killed?

The other surfers are laughing around us and their laughter clangs around inside our heads as a personal insult, because they have discovered that we should not be there and have seen the doubt and fear and horror of our imminent failure reeking and stinking off of us and the board we float on. Surely they must see the sharks circling in anticipation, waiting for us to be so stupid as to ride these impossible waves of life and fall down, down, down into their laughing mouths.

But the other surfers don't see the sharks because this is your life and your day dream, and part of the things that you have conjured up as part of your despair and fear. The other surfers are living in the same moment as you, but their courage has not failed and they have not created imaginary sharks and death does not await them on the soft sandy bottoms of their personal shores.

For them the sun shines and warms them to a perfect smile, leaving tanlines on their hearts that they expose later for their friends and complete strangers to see. And in those shared moments of tanlines and coconut oil and laugh lines crinkled into the eyes that expose the full light of their lives and the waves they have ridden, their personal courage and conviction and assurance is shared and spills like a beautiful wave from their eyes into the eyes of those they love. And so the expert knowledge of life surfing is passed on from one to another and when that person meets the exact kind of wave that was shared with them, they will instinctively know how to ride it, how to love it, how to survive it. How to be it.

But you remain on your board, afraid to move, afraid to ride or even paddle back into your personal failure, for only failure awaits a belly paddle that even the young groms can complete. The sun does not shine warmly upon your back, but burns you and you can not look at it. Sounds seem too sharp and loud and the water is cold and black, pulling you down to the sharks and your personal locker, constructed by none other than your old friend Davey Jones.

One of the veterans, a professional surfer, paddles over and floats next to you. His board bumps lightly against yours, and you feel a surge of adrenaline, and for the umpteenth time you ask yourself, "am I dreaming or is this really happening?" But dream or no, you FEEL it happening, as the adrenaline from your new friend spreads through the board, up and into your arms and legs and then it strikes your chest and you suffer a monstrous heart attack.

Your world explodes and fragments of it fall down around you, like the remains of another Terminator movie where you replace Arnold and blow up crap left and right. But you feel yourself becoming the good guy once again. The good Terminator. You feel courage attach itself to your blood cells, and your deflated ego is oxygenated and inflated. A crazy feeling overcomes you as the surfer beside you says, "Dude, let's ride."

You finally look over at him, but you can't see his face because the sun is reflecting off the water and there is a halo around his head and body. You ask him, "Are you an angel?" And he throws back his halo head and laughs long and loud, until a new sound joins in and is added to his laughter. You look around for the source and realize the source is you, and this makes you laugh even louder.

You notice how great the sun feels on your back, and how great the water feels as it laps and splashes across the board. A dolphin surfaces nearby and you smell the fish it just ate. The sharks have fled and the ocean is filled with beautiful colors that shimmer and sing to you.

"Let's ride"

Your angel friend takes off paddling before you and you follow with a laugh, desperate to catch up and maybe even share the same wave. Not always a good idea with the big stuff, but you don't care and so you catch up and catch the wave together where the sun is shining and cut over next to your lit up friend. You accidentally (or is it?) run up on to his board, prepare to jump, hoping your leashes don't get tangled.

But that never happens because the sun has come down to earth and is shining from your angel friend and you are falling, falling back up to earth, where you land on your driveway with a thud, giving thanks to the friend who pulled you back to surfing life once again. And you wish you could have seen his face, so you could thank him if you ever saw him again. But you didn't and you can't.

Which means that for the rest of your life you'll treat every single person you meet as if they are your angelic friend, the surfer buddy that helped you stand again in courage and audacity. Not such a bad payment to make, and one you look forward to, as you trek down to the end of the driveway and pick up the newspaper and prepare to surf another day away.