The surfboard

I have never surfed in my life. Not even once. Nevertheless, It is an activity I am fascinated about. It is hard for me to look away when I see someone riding a decent sized wave on a beach. A few years ago, I even used to watch videos of people surfing on youtube. There is something very energizing about someone letting the energy of the waves carry them.

The riding of waves, the most enjoyable part of surfing, happens only 10% of the time. Most of the time, a surfer would be doing something called paddling. They lay on their board and paddle. They wait for a wave they can ride. And if they fail to catch that one, they go back to paddling. If they happen to ride it, they go back to paddling after they are done.

A surfer does not get to ride the waves on their bare foot. They stand on a firm peace of board. While the water underneath is always changing, the board is firm. It is that firm board that helps the surfer keep their balance and ride the biggest of the waves.

Impermanence is the basic reality of life. Things change. Most of the time the change is gradual and we are aware of the change. And when that happens, we adapt to the changing situation well. There are other types of changes . One is the rapid and dynamic change. We may be aware of it, we may even have opted for it, yet we may struggle to adapt when it hits.

I can think of a few such instances in my life. The first time it caught me off guard was when I left my hometown to attend college. I have moved cities and countries a few times since then. In the last twenty years I have lived in eight different cities on three different continents. And the last of these planned for joyful, yet hard to adapt to change was the birth of my daughter. Each time the change was something I consciously opted for and planned for. But each time I struggled with the change one way or the other. It felt like I was trying to balance myself when the floor beneath me was moving rapidly. And in order to balance myself through the change, I had to build a surfboard for myself.

Whenever I moved, there were some values, which did not fit quite nicely in my new environment. I still kept them. There were habits that are no longer useful. I hesitated to change them. There were people who no longer shared a routine with me. I spent hours every week trying to stay relevant in their lives. Values, habits and people. Those were my surfboards.

What is yours?