I think a lot about what kind of guts it took for the explorers of yore to get into ships and cross the Atlantic Ocean. People just lived like that, man. No phone or GPS system, just their ships and the wind and the stars and God. What a life. Part of me feels jealous, if I’m honest. (But only part of me.)
Sometimes waves just catch you that you never planned to catch you and they carry you to a height you’ve never known before and holy God is it glorious while it lasts. But all waves crash, too. This is true of jobs and businesses started and projects launched and proposals sent and relationships and marriages and virtually every other meaningful experience that we have.
My problem has always been holding onto the good in a situation — a job, a hobby, a relationship — too long even after it’s become unhealthy for me on the whole, wanting to get the good back, to get back to that good. Because there are those moments when it comes back, and that whole process becomes like its own form of drug addiction — the good/the high, the comedown, the bad times, the struggle, and then the joyous relief when the struggle ends and things feel good again. Rinse and repeat.
And because the brain is designed to keep us safe, not happy — and to our brain, which can be stupid, what feels safe is just what feels familiar, even if all we’ve ever known is pain and heartache and stress.
We have to allow our nervous systems to literally heal from that by becoming comfortable with peace and calm.
The impetus for this post was this good quote from The Good Place that fits for all I just mentioned up there:
Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it’s one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.
That quote’s about life and death. I think about it in terms of the things in our lives, too — those jobs, projects, businesses, relationships. For new things to grow and new seasons of life to take root and bloom, often other things have to die first. That doesn’t mean they weren’t beautiful and worthwhile. They are what lead us to what comes next.
What comes next might just be different than we thought it would be when we started the thing that’s ending and that’s where we struggle. We struggle to let go, especially when something ends differently or sooner than we think it should. But we have to let them end when the end has come — we have to accept it when life has shown us that no matter what we do, a situation is no longer good for us.
Maybe we went into that situation thinking it was one thing, only to learn things that make the situation unsustainable — but things that we couldn’t have known until we lived in the situation itself.
Reminds me of surfing and what I’ve learned from those who are great at it (and reminds me how much I want to learn to actually surf myself). Specifically, this part of my 2022 SI cover story about Kelly Slater:
Slater would stare up at the Pipeline posters on his walls and study the waves in magazines and on videos. But when he got his first chance to confront them, at 12, he was overwhelmed by Pipeline’s monsters. A wave, he says, slammed him into the water, against the reef beneath, pinning him under his board. All he could do was hold his breath until the ocean let him up.
A few years later, undeterred, Slater moved to the North Shore—this was where you made a name for yourself. But many days he just sat on the beach, watching the Pipe waves, “stuck with fear” as he studied them and the brave souls who tried to tame them. “Surfing’s a calculated risk,” he says. “There’s danger and there’s skill, and you figure out where those two things intersect.”
That, and you “eat s--- a bunch of times.”
Slater remembers a trick an old friend taught him: Laugh at the waves. “Get rid of the fear,” he says. “Understand what the wave is going to do. And become part of it.”
That was the way. Become part of it. And he found that to do that, to know the ocean, he had to know himself. “You’re dealing with a lot of unknowns,” he says. “But there is a pattern in the ocean. Yes, there is some kind of luck—but it just seems like the more connected you are with yourself, the better luck you have.”
That’s the real trick, isn’t it? Getting more connected with yourself. Too often the waves we catch we catch because our soul knows that our human needs them to learn more about its soul.
All waves eventually crash, but the rides they give us stick with us forever. Slater remembered that first near-killer Pipe wave from when he was 12, forever — same as he’ll also forever remember the Pipe wave he caught when he was 50 years old, to win against men half his age:
Near the end of his heat he snagged his biggest wave of the day, plummeting from the upper lip into the barrel like a man off a cliff—as if, he says, “I fell out of the sky.” He thought the crest would clip him, but the tube curled over instead. He would later call the moment “spiritual,” the ocean giving him something.
Emerging afterward, Slater held his face in his hands and fell back into the ocean in ecstasy as time expired, knowing victory was his. Seth Moniz, his 24-year-old opponent, embraced him in the water. On the shore, fans and opponents lifted him onto their shoulders. He popped champagne. He kissed his girlfriend Kalani Miller. He cried in his post-heat interview. He was No. 1 in the world for the first time in eight years.
That was Feb. 5. He would turn 50 within a week.
Of course, we only get the great waves after going through some bad ones. And sometimes the biggest and best waves crash faster and harder than we could have ever imagined. And sometimes when that happens, for a little while at least, we feel like those ancient explorers, lost at sea, with nothing but the wind and the wave and the stars and God.
But they also had something else, too, something to pass the time or to remember important information or to simply remind each other — and themselves — that whatever they face out there on the open sea, others have faced it too, and they survived it, and they can, too.
They had songs and they had stories.
They had art.
The wind and stars of the soul.
So when you’re feeling lost at sea hold to the art that sustained you before.
And go make some of your own.
You never know who’s going to need it.
And what it’s going to be for them.
Some wind. Some stars.
Hell, whether you mean to or not, you might show them some God.