Closing The Gap

Hey you,

It’s time to level with you. As a man who is now in my thirties, I have yet to master the art of getting the stuff done that I say I am going to do. Unfortunately, I didn’t magically wake up on my thirty-first birthday two weeks ago to find my to-do list in my journal all ticked off. Sorry if you are disappointed to learn that I am, in fact, a type B person, and I’m hoping we can move past it.

Any other type B’ers out there? I’ve got a question for you: what’s the thing that you’ve been meaning to do? That thing that you keep saying yes/soon/eventually to, that pops up time and time again, and you still haven't gotten closer to completing. I’ll bet some type A’ers out there have something too. So at least we are all on the same page, right?

“That was a gnarly wave, dude.” I hear him say it, as I come up for air, coughing and spluttering, after a tsunami of a wave has just knocked me from my shiny white surfboard, pushing me underneath the water. Any pretence that I was this cool, Scottish guy in his first surf lesson in Malibu on the Californian coast, (at least to my new surf instructor anyway) was completely robbed.

I hadn’t planned this. In fact, a mere twenty minutes ago, I had been the main character in a plot against me, totally unaware of the fact. My partner had told me that we were going for a birthday surprise, and that I was to pack beach towels and sunscreen. Harmless, some might think. My initial instinct led me to believe we were going to have a picnic on the beach- one of my favourite things to do in summertime, of course. But I should have sensed something was up. Arriving at a hidden spot on the coast, with no one else around us, and my partner walking shiftily around, trying to find something or someone, should have made the alarm bells start ringing.

It wasn’t until we were both walking up to a white van, where the most Californian guy you could ever lay your eyes upon, stood in a wetsuit and surfboard in hand, that my stomach folded in on itself. Oh no.

For the longest time, my running joke (that quite literally no one laughs at) has been that my Californian surfer dreams were ripped out of my hands before I could speak and kick up a protest. Born in San Diego to two Scottish parents, what my life may have looked like had they not chosen to move back all those years ago has constantly played out in my mind. Would I be needing this very surf lesson as we speak, had we decided to stay? Would I have been on the Disney Channel and become a famous childhood starlet? Heck, would I be the President of the United States right now?

And so this sentence, this thing that had become my ‘bit’, had become part of my identity. Even now, living here in California, I still very much feel on the outside of things. I watch the surfers with their bleached blonde hair and sandy tan lines, but only from afar - I’m not them. I can visit Laguna Beach and live out every single trope of a surfer lifestyle in one day, and still, that is not my life, no matter how mad I am about it. Sometimes I have the urge to roll down my car window and shout at the teenagers on the street, “You kids don’t even realise how lucky you are”! Thankfully, I refrain.

No, no, my dream of being a California surfer dude was stolen from me, whether I liked it or not; that was just my story. There was something comfortable about it. To be totally frank with you, I’m scared of the ocean. I’m not the best swimmer, I don’t like not being able to see what is underneath me, and my irrational mind always goes thinking I’ll have my limbs ripped off by a great white (my legs are one of my best features). The easy option, the one that has become so effortless to uphold, is that I missed my chance. I was doomed to forever watch from the sidelines and be okay with it.

You can have everything you ever need to achieve a dream, and still find the excuse not to. You can be dropped into the right scenario, the right setting, it can literally be handed to you on a serving platter, and still, you can choose to ignore that something cosmic is happening right before our eyes.

It’s like that story of the man in the flood, who asked God to save him. A man in a rowboat comes to his rescue, but he refuses to accept, thinking God will intervene directly with help. The same thing happens when a motorboat and a helicopter appear, and still he refuses. The man drowns, and when he asks God why he didn’t answer his prayers, he responds by saying that he sent the rowboat, motorboat and helicopter. What more did he want? Here I was suddenly, in California, on the coast in Malibu, with my partner who knows me deeply enough to book a surf lesson for my birthday, and yet…

Everyone has their version of this. Maybe you keep telling yourself that you’ll start your new gym membership next week, or start the stylish closet of your dreams at the next paycheck. It’s the new language you’ve always told yourself you’ll learn someday, or the place you’re you’ll visit before you die. It’s me being brave enough to start The Gloaming, and say out loud, I want to be on the New York Times bestseller list one day. There is a gap for all of us between our intention and the action we must take. At first, we get the dopamine hit when we say we are going to do something or become someone, and that’s where it ends. Like a drug, it wears off, and we continue the shame spiral of just never really getting there.

I read somewhere this week about how to get lucky in life. For the longest time, I remember telling myself that I wasn’t a lucky one. Everyone around me seemed to be achieving so many things, just falling into their laps, and my luck…well, it had completely run dry. It felt like my first death, in a way. The jolt from young adulthood into becoming a man. That feeling of unshakeable confidence, that I was the exception to the rule - when it came to my acting career, to not attracting hateful people in my life or online, to getting any person I wanted. Boy, oh boy, did that come to a crashing halt. And do you know what? I am so thankful it did.

It led to this realisation (very much with the help of my partner) that you have to put yourself in more places where luck can actually find you. Mind-blowing. Here I was, this entitled twenty-four-year-old, crying about the fact that luck wasn't landing into my lap anymore. I'd stopped taking risks; I kept doing the same thing and kept arriving at the same outcome. It wasn’t until I had no other choice but to go out and find it that luck started to happen again.

‘Luck favours motion, because motion increases collisions with information, people and timing. Luck is not magic; it is exposure multiplied by readiness.’

It would be remiss of me to put down the fact that this boy, who was born in California, grew up in Scotland and was now back where he first started in a full circle moment, to anything but luck. Standing on a surfboard in Malibu, on his birthday, looking out at his partner waving and cheering at him from the shore. It makes the hairs on my arms stand up. Not because I just waited around and expected all of it to come to me, but because I went out and found it.

The instructor is behind me, and I’m lying flat on the board, my arms on either side of me, ready to push myself up when I get the all clear. I go through the steps in my head- left knee on the board, right foot swings forward and lands, push up with my arms, and stand. Hilarious, I think. There is no way I’m going to stand up on this board. I’ll just keep falling, and that’s fine for today.

But something else happens.

The Chris that my partner expects to see on this board, and the one that I expect to be, isn’t here. Instead, a serenity washes over me in this water, and I am nothing but calm. All my inhibitions, all my fears, everything, are at peace. I’ve fallen down multiple times, I’ve swallowed so much seawater that my mouth is dry, and one of my contact lenses has been lost to the ocean entirely. But I am unfazed.

A truth of mine is that I live with anxiety, and I have ADHD. Some days, it feels as though the ocean is crashing against me, and I’m drowning underneath the force of it all. But not today. Today, I just keep going. The instructor shouts, “Go”, and I begin. Left knee on the board, right foot swings forward and lands, push up with my arms, and stand. It’s happening. I’m looking out in front of me, at everything I’ve ever asked for, all the luck I found for myself. In this moment, I close the gap with the person I’ve been longing to be, and the person that becomes it.

I talk about the glimmers of our everyday lives. They happen quietly in moments, and unless you stop to realise them, to witness them fully, in the gloaming, then night comes before you know it, and you miss it. For me, my thirty-first birthday will always be known as the glimmer where I finally closed the gap of thinking I’d missed my chance of becoming a Californian surfer dude, and actually became one. I’ll never forget it.

Until next time,

Chris