This bit of happiness in the water transfers to the rest of your life. Isn’t that great? Photo: Joao Bracourt.
Early last week, I woke up with a slightly swollen elbow. It didn’t seem like too much–I figured I’d either been bitten by something or knocked it on something. Swellbow was pretty much a daily occurrence when I was younger and skated ramps, and I’ve found more than a few scorpions/spiders in my bed. But within three hours, it was obvious that something else was wrong.
As my arm continued swelling, a fever hit me like a bus. By the end of the first day, I was at 103 and climbing. Puking and shaking, my elbow quickly ballooned into something closer to a football than an arm. Three days later, after a peak temperature of 104 and change, something resembling a seizure, some of the weirdest middle-of-the-night hallucinations ever, and a few days on an IV with antibiotics, I was on the road to recovery. It was a weird week. Infections aren’t all that fun.
Chances are that I got it from the water. A small cut on my elbow probably let in some vicious bacteria that decided to take up residence in my body and vomit its filth into my blood. Of course, this all happened during a pretty decent run of swell–ain’t that always the way? During my semi-lucid moments, I stared at the cams, swearing at my arm and my temperature. I haven’t surfed yet because I’m still a little fucked up, and the waves have since gotten worse, but it got me thinking: I take surfing nearly every day for granted. Now, I’m stuck at my house, miserable, cranky, and restless… and it’s all because I haven’t surfed in a few days. Surfing makes my life better. Here are five reasons why.
1. Turning off.
Before I spent my days in front of a screen, I was a utility arborist. I spent my days in trees, cutting dead parts of them away from power lines. I’d work 12 hours, then collapse into some shitty hotel room bed after eating eight pounds of noodles, drinking four Guinness, and eating a box of shitty cereal for desert. I was constantly physically tired; worn out entirely. But I never felt restless. My brain never felt like it was going much too fast. Now that I spend 6-8 hours staring at a screen, those are both daily occurrences, and they are much worse than being exhausted. Surfing serves two purposes (among many others): you can’t look at a screen, and you’re getting exercise, both things that are invaluable to feeling good.
2. The simple act of floating.
Floating feels fucking GREAT. Surfing is all too often exclusively thought of as the actual act of riding a wave. Unless you’re getting judged, it is far more than that. It’s floating, it’s waiting, it’s looking, it’s silence. It’s spending time inside your head instead of inside the internet. Long lulls can be a blessing, if you’re not concentrating solely on riding a wave. Waiting can be rewarding; it can be satisfying, and it can reset your brain like not much else can do.
3. Focus.
The way things are now, chances are pretty good that you spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet. It’s a glut of information, both useful and useless. Hours fly by, wasted on looking at things that, in the long run, are completely pointless. One website leads to another in a truly endless rabbit hole filled with boxes of data strung together like so many fragmented strings. It becomes nearly impossible to concentrate solely on one single thing. Surfing, on the other hand, forces you to focus all of your attention in one place. It’s a funnel for your thoughts, ending in tiny moment in time, and teaching your brain to stop flailing around like a monkey on fire will help in the more mundane parts of your life. Buckling down and doing one thing at a time will, in the end, save you time on the things you’d rather not be doing and give you more to do things you would.
If you’re reading this right now, and you’re feeling restless and crabby, shut off whatever you’re looking at and go surfing, even if the waves are junk. Go sit on a surfboard for a few hours. It’s better than sitting on a couch, and I promise, your day won’t get any worse.
