RafexKiara Tangled Up in All Your Pieces // Riara

Chapter 20

To me, surfing is like playing music. You use various boards to play various tunes.

It calms me down; making it a Zen experience for me. The ocean being breathtaking, serene, and majestic.

When I'm riding a wave, the rest of the world vanishes.

Surfing is special among sports in that it transforms an irrational and worthless drive into a crucial way of life, rather than a talent into an art.

Life is a much like surfing... When you're in the impact zone, you just have to get back up.

Because you never know what's going to be over the next wave.

Riding a wave takes our minds out of the everyday, and places them in the exceptional of being in the moment.

There's no need to be concerned about mortgages or the angst of being poor or rich.

When you enter the realm of an ocean cylinder, that split second belongs to the Zen portion of just existing.

Surfing is an excellent metaphor for life in general.

The very excellent stuff - chocolate, fantastic sex, weddings, and funny jokes - occupies only a small fraction of an adult's existence.

The remainder of life consists of paddling: work, bills, flossing, getting sick, and dying.

Waves, I believe, have a strange duality for most surfers—certainly for me.

They appear to be alive while you are engrossed in surfing them.

They each have individual and nuanced personalities, as well as rapidly shifting moods, to which you must respond in the most instinctive, almost intimate way—too many people have compared riding waves to making love.

However, waves are not living or sentient, and the lover you reach out to hug, may become deadly at any time.

It's not a personal attack.

That self-dismembering death wave on the inside bar isn't bloodthirsty.

That is merely reflex anthropomorphism.

It's a one-way street when it comes to love.

We adore surfers for the same reason we like surgeons, pilots, firefighters, and shamans, for the same reason we appreciate great soldiers: they have bowed to a power far bigger than themselves, in this case the wave, and subjected to the brutal rigors of its discipline.

They've let themselves be molded and polished by the water.

They have surrendered to this bigger power day after day, year after year.

Crushed and chastised, pounded into something tempered and tough, and constantly refined to an edge.

They are warriors in the greatest meaning of the word: by submitting to the often brutal demands of surfing, they have turned themselves into beings capable of responding to immense brutality with grace and humility.

And, of course, beauty.

Was I really 'surfing'? I chased waves intuitively, got suitably pumped when they were excellent, and became completely absorbed in figuring out a new spot's puzzle.

Nonetheless, peak times were, by definition, rare and infrequent.

The majority of the sessions were routine. What remained constant was a sense of calm after a strenuous exercise.

This post-surf attitude was physical, but it also had an emotional undercurrent. It was sometimes euphoric. It was usually a joyful sadness.

I had a heated and crazy need to weep after really severe tubes or wipeouts that may persist for hours.