I’m a swimmer, but I don’t surf. However, I imagine surfing takes the same practice, patience, grit, balance, thick skin, and ability to read the water, just like swimming. Great swimmers have a natural feel for the water, and create movement from that.  Great surfers have a natural feel for how the water moves, and create patterns around that. Both take finesse. I bet if I asked which one sounds more exciting and rewarding, most would say surfing. The black line on the bottom of a pool is, in fact, extremely boring. Surfing is inherently risky, and thus, fantastically thrilling, I imagine.  Great Risk=Greater Reward. At least, that’s what we’re taught.  It’s ingrained in us from birth.  We’re praised for taking risks. We’re praised even more for failing—even when it repeatedly hurts—because we might (eventually) get something better.

“Ride it out until you catch that one amazing ride of your life.”

“Go all in, and at all cost.”

“Nothing good comes easy.”

“If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

“Fall down 7, get up 8.”

It’s as though we must grind through the days, and keep crashing, or somehow we don’t deserve the big prize of a better, more fulfilling life.

I’m a swimmer, and I don’t surf. Yet for years, I’ve been trying to get up on my board, and I keep crashing.  I crash in the same set of waves every time. I thought repeated crashing was an inherent part of the journey I was supposed to take, and what I had to endure to reach “better.”

When you surf, you learn to read the waves ahead of time. If it looks gentle and rolling, you take it, but just for practice. And you practice in order to push yourself into something more challenging and worthwhile.  Challenging is exciting and risky. Challenging is committing fully without backing down. Challenging is an adrenaline spike from simultaneous excitement and fear. Challenging is success waiting to happen.

So you swim hard to catch the big one, and it’s sheer elation when you do.  All you remember is that incredible feeling of soaring through the spray. You forget all the falls, the fear, and the pain. It’s like child birth: the most painful, fearful, heart-jerking moments of your life, and once the baby arrives…poof! You feel nothing but elation and wonder why you don’t have 12 more already.  What pain? What were you even afraid of in the first place? This is nothing short of magical.

Or, perhaps you go after that wave and swim hard, but not hard enough. Typical, that’s what you always do. You’re too slow and your timing is off. So you fight to adjust and eventually fall off balance.  At least you tried and didn’t give up like you usually do.

Next time, you swim even harder, but miss it completely and it’s total embarrassment. You were never good enough to catch it, you should have known, but maybe no one noticed your failure. If you were more fit or fierce you would have gotten it. You’d rather crash 1000x than not even come close. Don’t draw attention to yourself, close your eyes and block it out. Try again.

So you wait for the biggest set you’ve seen. But somehow you misread it. You were so focused on proving to yourself that you could do it that you’d forgotten to take into account the surrounding elements: wind, erratic swirling of the sand below, and a break in the wave pattern.  It’s suddenly choppy and inconsistent.  But it’s just water, and you can swim fast, so you decide to go for it even though your gut says not to. You lose focus because it doesn’t feel right. You panic, can’t breathe, and envision an epic crash.

No. Not again. If you listen to your fears, it makes you vulnerable to pain. So, suck it up. You’ll crash and you’ll just get back up and do it as many times as it takes to catch it. Learn to get better.

You tell yourself you’re weak for second-guessing, and that you should be strong enough to adapt to any conditions. You dismiss the sight and feel of choppy water, as well as your stupid intuition, and you replace it with shame.

You are determined not to sit back and watch potential pass by. So you swim even harder to catch the wave, and are sucked into a spinning, dark abyss. You are swirling in slow motion because it’s deja vu. You’ve done this before, knew what was coming, and now it’s your fault. You’re upside down in a whirlpool that you got yourself into. You deserve this. Shame takes over again. 

What if you just stay down there? You wouldn’t disrupt any water and could quietly observe from below. The choppy surface wouldn’t affect you here. No no one would pressure you to try again, judge your failure, or blame you for crashing. No one would even notice.

You almost drown in the feeling-sorry-for-yourself-whirlpool, but the same shaming voice that told you to take the wave (and then to stay underwater) smacks you back into reality. It says you’re even weaker if you can’t figure out a way to get up for air by yourself. And so you do.

You praise yourself for being strong enough to take a risk and make a mistake, rather than praise your intuition that begged you to pause and look around. You buried that intuition long ago that says, “You are good enough just hanging out on your board today.  Observing and absorbing is the experience.” 

Water is hard when you fight it. The bigger the wave, the harder the impact. Most people would say, “Work on your timing.  Read the wave better next time. Get stronger. Fight harder. Someday it’ll just happen because you didn’t give up.” 

So many outlets steer us towards grit and perseverance. Battles are good. Success requires continuous failure and clawing our way to the top. That is celebrated. It’s in our genes: fall down, get back up and learn to walk on your own. We get praised for effort and failure equally. We’re praised even more when we get hurt, and we’re shamed for avoidance or listening to our intuition that tells us to pause and listen to our fears. We’re taught not to use experience as a tool to redirect us away from the same crashing patterns we throw ourselves into.  We’re taught to fight the water, or at the very least to keep trying to surf it.

“That a girl! That wasn’t so bad, and you weren’t afraid! Get up and try again!”

What’s wrong with being afraid when you know how hard that water feels when you crash? What about celebrating the ability to float rather than the ability to endure? We are shamed into thinking we should do more and endure, simply because we can.  In fact, we’re often judged by our capacity “to do” rather than our capacity ”to be” just as we are. I have immense capacity, and I am just beginning to get a feel for how much. But the question is: the capacity for what? To feel and trust the patterns in order to avoid the crash.

Avoidance.  It’s often synonymous with weak or afraid.  On the contrary, avoidance comes from knowledge of past experiences, confidence in who you are in that very moment, and intuition which reminds you that pain doesn’t have to precipitate gain.

Patterns are etched into our minds and bodies through past experience, and yet we still deny our intuition when it attempts to guide us away from crashing.  The ability to feel and learn from patterns is just like having a surfing coach alongside as you analyze the incoming set of waves. The coach reminds you not to take that chance based on what your future goals look like, but rather on what the choppy water feels like in that moment, which forewarns you of ensuing danger.

Coach yourself to take in the whole environment, versus selecting bits and pieces to serve your ego.  Ego shames us for floating.  But the coach says, “Stay here and float, I’ve seen this pattern before and it doesn’t feel right.” How can trusting your experiences be weak?  Perhaps it’s simply a more peaceful way to enjoy the water.

I’m done riding waves, sick of crashing, and disgusted at myself for constantly misreading the environment, or actually, for ignoring the environmental patterns. I’m even more done with convincing myself that I need to do and be more.  Floating and observing is an art. It takes confidence, patience, and practice to be as you are, just like surfing.

Finessing the float is the release of external expectations.  We are taught that great success goes hand-in-hand with great failure and pain, and that failures must be over-corrected if we are to learn from them.  What if failures weren’t followed by a high-five or a “good girl” as positive reinforcement? Would we still chase them? Maybe we would instead allow ourselves to choose a different path, just to feel better.  There is often shame in that choice, which prevents us from choosing ease over grit. Floating means unlearning patterns as well.

Success can be internal, and you have the capacity to determine what that feels like. To me, success feels less like riding a wave and more like following a trickling mountain stream with my eyes. It feels like being enraptured by the sight, sound, and gentle flow that urges me to calmly watch, rather than run towards the rushing water around the next bend. Gentle flow feels like universal peace and love.

So perhaps less is more.  Less competition, less accolades, less money, fewer friends…and fewer crashes.  Maybe more isn’t the end goal after all.  What is the greatest good for ourselves and others?  It’s the release of expectation from every outlet in the universe to strive for more.

So float. You don’t have to ride the waves. You are enough right there, as you feel them. Feel the water, the sky, the wind, and the depths below. Those elements collectively create the big picture, and maybe that’s the goal.

As a swimmer, I used my feel for the water to create flow patterns to move through it.  Although I still have a great feel for the water, I don’t use my skills to surf for a rush.  I simply translate and trust what I observe about the fluid patterns moving towards me, and finesse the float.