surf school

watery lessons for a three-year old who is also eighty-seven

I lied about not being able to meditate in the ocean. You can do it, just wide-awake and a little roughed-up. If you find the sweet spot where bobbing on a board at the water’s edge is scary, but not terrifying—where you’re only occasionally getting slammed into the sandy bottom, your ears, nose and throat flushed with brine, nutritive as amniotic broth—well, there’s nothing so primordial and refreshing.

When I was nearly three, my mother took me to Barbados. She was just months away from giving birth to my sister and I remember wondering, how dare she, so plodding and enormous, stand up to those great walls of water? The ocean was an existential threat to us both. I forbade her from swimming. I’m told she spent the whole vacation staring out at the beach, sneaking dips while I slept.

I love me at three—full of surety and verve, unapologetic and daring (except at the turbulent shore). I want to be like that girl. And the break still scares me.

While we’re on the topic of ages that I literally am not, though actually I perpetually am, you should know I was born eighty-seven. I’ve always felt the presence of some wiser version of myself, watching and rooting for me, smiling with wonder as I bumble in her direction.

Because of these inner-identities, nobody delights me more than little girls and old ladies. And nowhere have I felt the merger of these two selves more closely than I did a few weeks back, floating at the edge of roughness and calm, trying to catch a wave in Portugal.

There are so many lessons to take from the water.

Those waves appear in sets—if you miss your chance, there’s another rolling in behind. (Might not be today, but there’s always tomorrow.) For a person who frequently frets that ‘big breaks’ have passed me by, it was a life-giving relief to look out to that flat horizon and think—ANYTHING could be coming. On the sea, and in life.

Your next great ride is building in a yet unseeable swell. And when it does suddenly make its appearance, you’ve got to paddle like Hell to catch it. I never understood the confluence of luck and effort so clearly.

Also: you don’t have to make everything hard! You don’t have to march through crashing, white water. Sometimes, you have to stand in the shallow looking stupid, with your huge apparatus bobbing beside you, waiting for the waves to calm. But you know what looks stupid-er? Getting whacked in the face by repeated walls of white, or having to dip under and let your board fling itself back to shore. Be patient and the breaks will settle. Then you can lay on your board and paddle out with all the grace of a three-year-old who is also eighty-seven.

Standing at the edge of the break, having finally understood I didn’t have to wield my 8’6” plank of foam and plastic through turbulence, I realized: hasn’t life always come at me this way? Good sets and bad ones; heaps of luck or misfortune, always all at once? So be patient. No matter what you’re getting, it’s going to change.

And what a delight to have been wrong. Of course you can meditate in the ocean, paddling out; enjoying the roaring silence and the long, wait as you straddle the board and run your hand through the clear blue, thinking is it even possible I’m here right now? Am I *too* happy?

Don’t panic. It’s okay to let the goodness wash over you.

So here you are, bobbing in calm water past the break. You got through the scary part. You feel the salt drying into the lines around your eyes, patterned like rays of sunshine. You keep hearing this one line in your ears: “how you do one thing is how you do everything.”

You look super goofy, laughing all alone out here, just you and your stinky, rental wetsuit. It’s okay, Isabel. You don’t have to stop smiling.

And here it comes—that swell a few moments out; the possibility to catch five seconds of bliss. You’re your best right now, vibrating with verve and wonder. You’re not thinking, but your patience and furious paddling works: the timing is right, the board drops, the turn succeeds and the ocean is you. That swell of power, the original womb, and your little spirit, sailing to shore, shouting Weeeeeeeeee.

Your friend,

Isabel