Recently I've had this feeling where I'll go through the day and my head is spinning with all kinds of stuff and then as soon as I'm on my surfboard and paddling out, it's not so much that all of that goes away, although it kind of does, but it’s almost like I've stepped through this membrane into this other life that I have also been leading all these years.

So my life of running around, driving around, doing this, doing that, calling these people, going here, going there, that has a continuity, and it's as if my surfing life has been this other life with its own continuity, like this other existence.  

I started surfing right after I graduated from college. I went to college on the East Coast and then I came here and I started going down to Santa Cruz to learn how to surf. And I just kind of freaked out at how beautiful the coast was there, you know? The surfing was really fun, but it was also like, ‘How is this even real – that this is an available lifestyle in my America? This is outrageous!’

When I got into graduate school in Santa Cruz to do the PhD in literature, I was surfing all the time and I really did have a feeling that it was a miracle.   

It was during those years that I wrote Caught Inside, and I was in a porous state of mind all the time, and it felt all-encompassing. I'd go surf at dawn, and then I’d see some bird or some plant, and then I'd drive straight up to campus, go to the marine biology library, and pull out all these monographs on whatever I had just been looking at, and read about them, and then take notes. And then I’d go home that afternoon and write and then I'd repeat that, day after day after day. 

It was just a really special way to be in the world, and I was really learning that the names for things let you see them. If you don't have names for different kinds of trees, you just see a forest, right? So, in a way, what I was doing was naming every single little thing on the coast for my eye, to harvest all those beautiful words.  

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I do think a lot about aging these days. Surfing plays a very big role in my life, and it really has for a very long time: I haven't missed a season in 35 years. And I think about how many more seasons I have left.  

Most of my surf buddies are a little older than I am, and a number of them are in their 60s and early 70s, and stuff is happening to the body.

One friend, in his late 60s, maybe early 70s, needed a new hip a few years ago, and he got the hip replacement partly because his arthritis in his hip was making it hard to to pop up on a surfboard. But something about the hip replacement made it so that he couldn't pop up on a surfboard at all, and he just pivoted to boogie boarding and he didn't miss a beat. 

And I really admire that. I really admire the emotional flexibility to do that, because people get so ego-invested in who we are as surfers: ‘Do I ride this kind of board? Do I go out on these days or those days? Do I get barreled or not barreled?

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Ocean Beach is so physically intense, and I’ve learned the value of gradually exposing yourself to challenges. About 10 years ago, I made this conscious decision that I wanted to surf bigger days here. And I really just wanted to surf more days, and there would be all these days when there'd be really good, long-period swells, and I wasn't going out. 

And I'd be looking out at the beach, thinking, ‘I’m just gonna go home. Or maybe I'll just put on my wetsuit, I'll grab my board, and I'll just start paddling, and I'll stay within my comfort zone. If I start to get scared, I'll just turn around and let the waves blow me the beach. I'll just see what happens; I’ll just try a little bit, and I'll try a little more the next time.’ And it works.

I think it applies to other things that one wants to learn. Try just do a little bit every time and put yourself a tiny bit outside your comfort zone every time. 

I recently went back and did a master's degree to become a therapist. I'm going through this career change, and I really love it. I’m pretty consumed with that project – the project of newness and learning and studying and trying to get better fast. And that's pretty thrilling.

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During the pandemic, my younger daughter was stuck home from school, and I said, ‘I can take you down to Linda Mar and teach you how to surf.’ And Linda Mar is like the beginner break around here that hardcore surfers never would go to. And I had barely ever gone there, but I wanted my daughter to learn how to surf, so I started taking her there, and I had this really distinctive experience of being in the water surrounded by all these beginners, and noticing that they were all having so much fun! 

They were just like, ‘Wow, this is so cool! I'm on a surfboard!’ And if they just stood up for a second, they would freak out and scream. And I was thinking, ‘You know, that's available here to anyone, right? And if I don't feel that way, that's a me problem. That's not a them problem.’

So I ordered a custom, gigantic longboard just for Linda Mar. And I started going there all the time.  

Just the other day, down at Noriega, there must have been 100 surfers in the water in a few-block radius, and 80 of them were very athletic young men between the ages of 25 and 35, mostly with mustaches.

They're really fit, and I’m the big old, fat guy. Part of my mind is thinking sort of grouchy thoughts about how ‘I've been surfing here since before you were born,’ and that grouchy noise can get going inside me. 

In one of the sutras in the Pali canon, which is the really old stuff, the stuff they think the Buddha actually said, this monk is asking questions like, ‘Can anxiety arise from an internal source?’ 

And the Buddha explains, ‘Yes, anxiety can arise from an internal source, if you think that something did not exist, and then existed and then again did not exist. So how can you avoid anxiety? Don't think that something did not exist and then existed and then did not exist. 

The lesson for me in that surf session is my frustration that I used to be younger, that I was once in my body in a way that I'm not anymore. Or that there's a way that the beach was back then – when nobody else was here, and I got all the waves I wanted. And so that is a thing that no longer is, right? So it's the attachment to the idea that something was and is no longer, whereas if I were a guy who just started surfing yesterday, I'd be amped out of my brain out there!