So what is surfing to me?
I came to it late, in my thirties, when I moved my family to LA to open an office of the company I started. The team in London bought me ten lessons and the moment I stepped into the water I was hooked. As with everything in my life I learn through my body, through experimentation. I went from longboards to mid-lengths and into the fringes of surf, which is where I have lived ever since. Not the mainstream slash-and-burn, tricks and heroic stance, but flat on my belly or on my knees, both humble and showing reverence to the surf gods.
My go-to craft is what is known as a surf mat. Since returning to the UK it has become my primary choice. Like a tiny lilo, as my daughter put it. A malleable bag of air, made of nylon with hidden construction wizardry inside. When I lived in LA I became fascinated by the flight of pelicans skimming the swell lines. Mat surfing is as close as a human can get to that sensation.
Anyway, this was not meant to be a sermon on fringe craft, but an exploration of what is so meaningful in the experience - why at this time of year I am once again drawn into the daily divination of surf charts and the six-hour round trips to get to some waves.
Here are the elements that keep me coming back.
The first is immersion. You are literally in the environment in the most visceral way imaginable. There is little time for thought, apart from the occasional wandering mind between sets as you bob up and down. The moment you enter the water you enter being here. There is no other option.
Secondly, you are in nature and connected to something bigger, primordial, unrelenting. During my last session whilst waiting for my next wave I noticed a shape in the water. A head popped out - inquisitive, wild, free. I spent an hour surfing alongside this brown seal. Its ease in the water showed me clearly that this is not a human environment. We are visitors, and there is beauty in that. Being in and out of your element all at once. Water calms the human psyche so deeply, and for me salt water is the ultimate tonic. My skin always feels better after immersion. The osmosis of elements is profound.
Thirdly, there is the loop of gratification. The hunger begins with a chart on a screen. It grows in the car. Peaks on the shore as you imagine lines that may or may not materialise. Then the suiting up - a winter wetsuit, no matter how advanced, is still thick rubber, a kind of space suit or seal skin borrowed to let us enter this alien territory.
Then comes the paddle out. Depending on the swell it will show you exactly what state you are in. It is a humbling entry. You duck under breaking waves to get “out back,” where anticipation becomes reward.
Finally, there is the timing. Choosing a partner for the moment and hoping it chooses you too. You spot a bump on the horizon, paddle towards it, turn, align with the direction of its energy, paddle again and hope the wave picks you up. If you are lucky and everything aligns, then the real practice begins. Allowing whatever comes to form you. To merge with that moment, that expression, that meeting.
If everything lines up and you have truly surrendered, then you become a living expression of what the Daoists call wu wei. Effortless action. Not action without effort, but effort that is completely aligned with what is. If not, the whole thing leaves you behind. You fall out of it. And the only option is to paddle back out and go again.
Place is also part of the cocktail. I am not one for crowded line-ups of serious, sometimes angry groups of rubber-clad men. I crave solitude, places others do not venture. My favourite spot is hidden: physically difficult to reach, a steep path to a rocky beach, then an 800-metre paddle to the point. It is hidden too because other surf craft would snag or be damaged on the rocks. None of this is an issue for me and my chosen tool.
This means I almost always surf alone. No line-up. No taking turns. Just me and whatever energy arrives from mid-Atlantic storms to this craggy coast. I am blessed with waves that travel thousands of miles to meet me for a fleeting moment, where I do my best to get out of the way while positioning myself to dance with them - in that moment the truest expression of being alive and being lived.
In those moments that no one sees, that no one other than the “me” that dissolves into the moment experiences, there is no record. No words that can describe it. Nothing other than life expressing aliveness.
In this sense surfing, in its fringe and purest form for me, is nirvana. Not a mythical realm, or an exalted state but a way of being this particular expression of the universe.
It sounds mystical and new age as I say it, which creates a small contraction in my stomach to use language like this. But perhaps it is simpler to say this: in those ordinary, extraordinary moments, ‘I’ do not exist. There is only the drawing of lines across a shifting body of water, following its truest nature, being only what it was ever able to be.
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