This photo was taken on my third day of pulling up at El Faro not long after the sun broke over the horizon, having been picked up an hour and a half earlier, at 5am by Pablo Narvaez, our guide from surf travel arranger, Thermal.
How bloody hard can writing be? As I sat in the water at dawn this morning, an isolated righthander break called El Faro all to myself and Pablo’s son called Diego, I started writing an essay in my head on why writing is so bloody hard. Turquoise and bathwater warm Oaxaca waters ebbed and flower around my feet, and all I could think about was how the often unflowing staccato of words and sentences and paragraphs emerging is actually a hundred small decisions. And that’s why writing will be so bloody hard.
And so, to a certain extent, fast writing needs a flow of fast decisiveness. Which is why writing is such a valuable skill to develop. Writing is more like the improvisation of a jazz solo, than the structure of a classical symphony. Glad to be taking this writing project on again, simply building the skill, the habit, in this wonderful period of career pause.
It was in the Australian late summer of 2003, living on Maroubra Beach, that I first coined the term surf ‘angst’. It’s that feeling that mounts over days and months, or sometimes even just hours (when you had a great session earlier that day), that you just have to get back in there into the visceral 3D-ness of sitting in the ocean on a surfboard, trying to catch its energy and tame it into your own little experience of flying, and to getting mauled by it in the washing machine drum of a breaking wave.
The word anxiety was hardly used then. Now it feels more common than ‘I have a cold’. We have more than ever before, and we yet we worry more too. I’ll never understand the disease. We’ve lost our minds. And anxiety will reduce standards of living and take more lives in the young than climate change, I’ll happily bet. We can adapt to shifting weather, but it’s much harder to adapt to your own lost mind.
Where we find ourselves being anxious, it’s important to strive to have a sense for how valid the fear is, and how to shift out of it. Every day we wake up in decent health, its a beautiful miracle of experience. And a bottom line for this experience has to be being able to keep a measured mind and some baseline of gratitude and gentle contentment just to have woken up for another chance at a day. Find a wave out of it 🙂 or, your own equivalent (the ocean unfailingly transforms any mopey or agitated head of mine…!).
