…that’s the feeling.
Call them goals, obsession, or just Peter Pan-forever-grom syndrome, but I want to surf the same way the pros do. Is that unachievable? Now that I’m zen, that word doesn’t exist. In 10, 15 and sometimes 20-minute meditation sessions, I lay down and picture hands behind my back, raw cutbacks on inviting shoulders a la Dave Rastovich. I have a cheering section rooting me through a barrel as I’m gifted a refracting shoulder as my finish line. I reach both hands behind me and finish off with a subtle hair flick claim. I touch the water and whip my board around, putting out fires on the back half of the wave. Is this “bliss?”
On a less sarcastic note, a week of meditating has me noticing minute changes on land and some others in the water. I’m slower to unnecessarily react to things I don’t like and I’m not head locking shitty thoughts that would normally ruin my day. Being present is so #buzzwordy but also about as fun as having a gun to your head when you’re blessed with anxiety. So I balk at the thought of being present. Even in the water, my mind is months into the future while my body slides into waves that I should be enjoying. So I meditate.
Again that cutback is the end game here. This one week of stopping what I’m doing, listening to the chipper and accessible (and British) voice of Andy Puddicombe – Headspace founder – has me hooked. I’m definitely drinking the kool-aid of something I would have laughed at a few years ago. It’s a shame it takes a well-polished and cute app to get into meditation but hey, it’s convenient.
On this end of the globe, we are the slowest to adopt Eastern practices like meditation and yoga, but maybe such results-based practices need a certain shiny packaging for us gluttonous North Americans to accept. I could be wrong but I’m sure the thousands of years of people taking this up before me aren’t.
Worrywart? Anxiously disabled? Or maybe just one flat white coffee too many is enough reason to download an app and stop for a second. I’m more than curious to keep this practice going and see what it does for my way of thinking and the relationships in my life but also…my surfing, too. I don’t want to fret about the last wave, the next one or if conditions are somehow about to get worse. I want to let loose everything I have into a turn and one day soon execute the cutback of my dreams.
