Wisdom in the Waves.
I’m an ocean boy. Growing up a 10 minute drive from the ocean meant that I spent a lot of time by the water. Not necessarily on the beach because it was England and yeah, it turns out hypothermia is a real thing, but sitting and listening to the crashing of the waves, the different sounds as the tide comes in and goes out and the relentless movement of the water day or night, come rain or shine.
The ocean is my friend, my healer and most of all, my teacher.
Because there’s a lot that you can learn, sitting in quiet reflection with the waves to guide you and carry you into the places in your soul that resonate with the water.
There’s a strength and a life to the ocean that lifts me up, and an eternal nature to the waves that allows me to measure the events and experiences of my life against the immense background of the timeline of the universe.
Which is an incredible lesson, and maybe for another day.
Today I want to focus on the lesson of one particular beach. It’s on the coast about an hour below San Francisco, a few minutes’ walk from a small parking lot. The pathway isn’t particularly pretty and once you get to the beach there’s no particular beauty to the coastline that draws your eye.
There is just the beach, the cliff, the massive waves and the rocks they pound you into if you’re crazy enough to go out there.
The beach is named Mavericks, and it’s killed some of the surfers who try to ride there.
If you ever get to see it with the waves at full height, you’ll soon decide that anyone who goes out there is crazy, which I’m sure they are. But the surfers share a lesson in their example as they place themselves into harm’s way, ready to risk their lives for the ultimate wave. The lesson is simple yet powerful, suicidal yet profound.
You have to find something that you love, and then do it as hard as you can.
Because once you hit that wave, you have to give it everything you’ve got. Failure to invest in the dream that has brought them to that wave will mean death for the surfer, because the ocean is an indiscriminate killer.
Once you start that ride, you better give it every ounce of everything you have, or it will be the last ride you’ll ever know. But when you invest the totality of your soul into that moment, riding the edge of eternity in a wave that is essentially trying to kill you, you’ll know life at a level beyond the everyday and the ordinary.
And the lesson is that you’ve got to give life your all.
Because you get one go at this that we know of. Sure, some people believe that you will live again, and who knows, maybe we will, but I can’t imagine a worse death than realizing that there was so much more you could have done, if only you had decided to go all in on your dreams, and see if you really are as good as you would like to think that you can be.
Sure you might fail, but you might also fly.
Because the other lesson from this beach is that life has moments when you are either on top of the wave, right at the crest, and other times when you are down in the trough, with an immeasurable amount of weight about to drop on you from on high.
All of us go through our highs and our lows, but it’s what you do when you’re there that matters more than anything else.
Rejoice when you are at the peak, and hold on when you are in the trough, because the wave will pass if you hold in there long enough.
This any many other lessons have been taught to me by the winds and the waves, sharing their wisdom and wonder without price and without favor.
Teaching their lesson to all who will listen.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings