Surfing the Waves of our Life
“There’s a part of every living thing that wants to become itself, the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, a damaged human being into a whole one. That is spirituality.”
— Ellen Bass
I’m walking along the beach in Baja today thinking about the quote from Ellen Bass and watching the waves rise and fall. They seem to come out of nowhere and rise up with great energy, then fold over on themselves and dissolve into chaos.
That seems like my life. I pursue my dreams with energy only to have them come crashing down. I forget that there is always another wave coming, sometimes a bigger one.
Then I see people here in Baja surfing those waves and wonder if I could surf the waves of my life. Actually, I’ve been doing that all my life, and so have you. We’ve fallen off the surfboard of our life many times, but we’re getting better.
Carl Jung said, “Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health.” That’s hard to believe when the last wave has thrown us to the ground and is pulling us out to sea. But, do we really want an effortless life in a calm sea?
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his book Notes from the Underground, said, “Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.”
What would our life be like if we were like those surfers who paddle into the ocean in search of the big wave? They wait patiently, then it lifts them up and carries them away to a spiritual experience for those who ride the waves all the way in. They don’t fight the wave. They don’t try to control it. They use the energy of the wave.
How can we use the energy of our life’s challenges to create something beautiful? We’re not going to change the waves. All we can do is get better at surfing them.