Thursday, February 26, 2009

Waves.

Waves are a lot like people…

There are good ones and there are bad ones. Some are destined to destroy and some provide joy to those around them. Each is born and inevitably each one dies. Most importantly, they are subject to the ultimate conundrum: we are all the same, but every single one of us is different. The divine fingerprint left on creation. By the miracle of some genetic card shuffle each one of us joins the cosmos irrevocably unique from every other, only to be shaped to uniqueness further still by the environment, events and people that make up our existence.

Those of us that have built a culture and a lifestyle around riding these waves know how important that connection really is. We know with certainty that every wave we have ever ridden is a distinct experience in its own right. Though we may enjoy hundreds if not thousands of waves in a lifetime, every single one provides an experience in someway different from every other. Like the multitudes of personalities that we will interact with in a lifetime, we combine with every wave to produce a completely separate, entirely unique experience.

There enlies the soul of surfing. The heart of our hobby so often corrupted when we call it a sport. In the ocean, we are in the realm of the majestic. We are visitors in a grand creation that we have no choice but to revere. By riding the ocean’s waves we engage in a dynamic dialogue with the creation, and thus the creator, to which we all are explicitly tied. Our reverence turns into worship and our hobby becomes a religion, a holistic lifestyle expression that reflects our relationship with the divine.

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