The thing i learned from surfing.

It took an aussie surf magazine to teach me what seems to be such a simple and poignant point of life. The moments of true happiness and satisfaction in our lives, measured in times, pales in comparison to the amount of time that we plan for those things. But, despite this bleak statistic, it makes those droplets of joy in the buckets of preparation, more than worth it. Take surfing for example.

Of all my time i spend on the sport, be it working on my board, prepping my gear, finding a break, paddling out, fighting waves or actually standing up, i spend less than 1% of that tune doing what I actually mean to do, standing up on the board and riding the wave. Those are mere seconds compared to the hours upon hours of work I take upon to do the sport.

eg. A few days beforesurfing , I would spend 3 hours working on my surfboards, fixing dings and delaminations and the like. This includes all the shopping for materials and equipments and the actual work. The day of surf, I take about an hour to prep all my stuff, cleaning my wetsuit, packing my board and everything. I take another 30 mins to drive to south carslbad. 15 mins to get ready to go out. I'm in the water for 4 hours or so. After, 15 , 30, and 60 mins to do all those things in reverse, and I've spent a good 7 hours 30 mins of a saturday on surfing and about 10 hours 30 mins out of my week for that one day of surf. What more, much of my paycheck goes to this sport, so hours on hours a week a drained by surfing just to pay for gas/wax/other supplies.

What gratification do I get out of it? Well, being very generous to myself, at a rate of 1 wave per 5 minutes (which is doable if I surf for an hour only, prior to fatigue setting in), I've ridden 48 waves. Each wave would last between 5 to 10 seconds (being very generous to my skills again, just to make the point). At an equally generous rounded up average of 8 secs per wave, I have spent 384 seconds, 6 minutes and 14 seconds, actually surfing.

And in each of those short spans of seconds, I feel sheer joy. For a moment, I forget everything except for that wave. There is a still peace about me. It makes the 99% + of my time spent on the sport more than worth it.

Real life, as in surfing, is overwhelming preparation and perspiration for relatively minuscule spans of joy. My sister-in-law planned for a year for a 3 hour wedding reception. My friend is going to med school for for 5+ years to become a doctor. He makes a decision to destroy his social life for his goal. When he graduates he will have a few moments of joy and ecstasy only to start again once he starts working to pay off all that crap. People save money and vacation time for years to take a few weeks off with their families. I and thousands of others spend 4+ years getting a BA or BS, for a brief 10 seconds on the stage to be recognized for it. People spend an hour+ to get on a ride at disneyland or magic mountain.

I have spent the past 3 summers and 1 winter of my life trying to surf. And yesterday, it all came to fruition. For at least a year now, I've been able to, more or less, consistently ride waves (as it breaks). But, yesterday, in an unreal time and space, I rode the face of a wave that had not broken yet. It managed to paddle as fast as this ripple in the ocean and catch it. Angled to the left, I glided across the clear and unbroken wave, not feeling the tumultuous ride I'm so accustomed to. I freeze and don't know what to do. I just ride.

I became a surfer