Riding a Paradox
Surfing's Absurd Path to Simplicity
I recently heard a podcast where the host and guest were discussing ways to destress. The guest was dismissive of surfing as possessing any unique power saying, and I paraphrase, that people go surfing and then claim that it was surfing that healed or transformed them. Really, he argued, it is just a matter of removal from routine, from our screen-ified world, from the complexity that we create so swimmingly in our lives. Anything–from yoga to reading a novel–would have had the same effect.
I have always been drawn to water. From swimming competitively starting at age five to rowing crew in college, from weeks-long canoe trips in the backwoods of Canada to taking daily walks just to lay eyes upon the ocean while living in California, I have been drawn to the feel of being immersed in it, to its gurglings and thundering, to the slow but cutting power with which it carves through the earth to its seemingly unending expanse upon the horizon; I have been drawn in a way that feels more like a compulsion than a desire. In water, there are reflections, but there are also echoes. As with my own slow pace in life, water makes its mark on the earth with a slowness that ultimately can sculpt deep and beautiful canyons into the earth–scars of infinite repetition. The neverending newness, the cyclicality of water’s journey, meets the hardness of the earth and, as Norman MacLean describes “runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops…I am haunted by waters.” Where mountains inspire, water haunts.
In contrast to the aloof dismissal of surfing by the aforementioned guest, it seems to me there is indeed something unique to the power bodies of water exert over us–foremost among those being, of course, the ocean. In its highest moments, surfing allows you to graze upon the surface of this power and in its most frightening moments to be crushed by its indifferent jaws. Surfing situates your own movement on movement itself. While it seems as though this chaotic state might make the world feel even more destabilizing, it appears to have the opposite effect–to continually draw us to enter, as Wendell Berry puts it in his poem “Like The Water” “willing to die, into the commonwealth of joy.” Water is abundance, boundlessness, and boundarylessness. Standing atop the surface of the water, with its impossibility and vulnerability, is to occupy a liminal space between sky and earth, between movement and timelessness, between the unknown and the unknowable. It is to recognize that being between is all we ever are and to find a peace in the always unfinished and never realized project of life, a “peace inside the turmoil” as Laird Hamilton has described it. You can love the ocean deeply, but you can’t attach to it. I would argue that it is in such liminal spaces that simplicity is paradoxically found. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia has said: “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.” This may be because simplicity is found through philosophical absurdity rather than rationality. In other words, as the search for meaning will yield none, it is only the creation of meaning that matters.
In her book, Saltwater in the Blood, Easkey Britton shares her sense of “the power and potential of these special places of encounter, these liminal spaces or thresholds where something is always about to begin or be lost.” In fact, many people turn to surfing in life’s most difficult moments–when they themselves feel lost or broken. Norman Farb, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto Mississauga studies the relationship of our identities to our emotional states. Through his own research, and through a personal experience of witnessing his mother struggle when reality “rupture[d] her model of the world,” he has seen how the mental maps we create of the world can become a catastrophic disaster when our lives don’t align with the stories we have told ourselves about how they will unfold. In trying to make sense of the dissonance, reason only serves to keep placing one back into existing narratives in an endless rumination. Clinging to a broken mental map becomes like clinging to a styrofoam cup in the middle of the ocean. So how does one adjust to the changes in our life paths when they force us to veer wildly off course and we feel completely lost? What Farb and his colleagues have discovered is that attuning to the sensations that surround us can break negative thinking patterns. Surfing requires this kind of “sense foraging.” While surfing, it is not merely pleasurable to be aware of the motion of waves, the feel of your body in the water, the direction of light and wind, the currents and rhythm of the ocean, it is required.
Recently, we moved. Our new home is a small Cape perched on the edge of a serene pond amidst pine, maple, and flowering dogwoods. Slightly uphill sits its detached garage. In between the house and the garage lies a border: the house dwells in one town while the garage lives in the neighboring town. Every day, multiple times a day, we cross a border. Though rather insignificant to our daily lives, this border does have consequences–different town water/sewer services, separate real estate taxes, and different school systems. For some of these we can choose a side (schools, address), but for others we remain divided, cleaved, split in two (taxes, utilities, getting from the house to the car.) Borders are ideologically definitive, and yet they exist precariously, unsettled, wavering in the physical world and our lived experience.
Surfing affords more than an outlet in a confusing world that so often seems to break you in the only places you thought you couldn’t break. It allows us to hover on a border and to simultaneously know that border does not exist. The waves reach for us and then shrink away, beckoning and then disappearing like everything will. Camus wrote about how all humans strive to give a unity to their existence that does not exist. Or as Farb might explain, to tell a coherent story that adheres to reality. Because of that impossibility, because this desire is ultimately unreasonable, there is only failure. Our task is not to apply laws to reality, but to create it. Art–of which surfing is a form–“teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars.” In the acceptance of paradox, in the continual in-between, in the worlds of the impossible and the possible, surfing accepts both the sea and the stars and carves a path through the water which will instantly and forever disappear.
In order to access surfing-related resources this week, I am inviting you into the heart of Constructed Mind. The link below will take you straight to the website’s page on Surfing. Feel free to explore around the website while you are there. Head’s up though—the website is a work in progress and, because the project is quite large, there are many pages that don’t exist yet and links that will as of now take you nowhere. I am aware that it is certainly not the normal practice these days to invite people into the middle of something unfinished. But I would like you to be with me as I build because I believe in this project, because I want to be vulnerable enough to share my own (and my project’s) incompleteness and flaws, and because I am open to your suggestions and feedback as I continue to develop Constructed Mind. Enjoy the curated surfing resources below and I look forward to sharing more growth as this project grows with me and you.
From your fellow thought explorer and eternal seeker,
Katie