[ HIGH SURF INTRODUCTION ]

An extract from my 2007 book, High Surf

WHY SURFING? WHY NOW?

"There is a wisdom in the wave . . ." - Dr. Dorian ‘Doc’ Paskowitz

“Surfers are the ‘throw-aheads’ of mankind, not the dregs; they aren’t the black sheep of humanity, but the futurists and they are leading the way to where man ultimately wants to be. The act of the ride is the epitome of ‘be here now,’ and the tube ride is the most acute form of that. Which is: your future is right ahead of you, the past is exploding behind you, your wake is disappearing, your footprints are washed from the sand. It's a non-productive, non-depletive act that's done purely for the value of the dance itself. And that is the destiny of man ... It’s perfectly logical to me that surfing is the spiritual aesthetic style of the liberated self and that’s the model for the future.” Timothy Leary, Surfer Magazine, January, 1978.

In a boardroom in Bangkok, several hundred miles from the nearest surf beach, big wave rider Ross Clarke-Jones lectures a group of advertising industry directors. Their conference is titled, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” and Ross is their impeccably qualified guest speaker. His topic: risk taking, trusting instincts, jumping through windows of opportunity - the tenants of surfing huge waves neatly mirroring the latest business school doctrine.

In New York, eminent scientist and biotechnician Vezen Wu, after discovering a new form of antibiotic in carnivorous plants and developing cutting edge medical software, has his world of computers, petri dishes and microscopes abruptly turned upside down when he discovers surfing. He finds himself thinking about waves all day long, doodling them in his notepads, between dedicated surf sessions in New York’s grey and chilly waters. So smitten is Wu by the sense of euphoria surfing gives him, he devises a new research project - running clinical trials using surfing to treat depression. Wu becomes convinced that the negative ions generated by breaking waves could provide a natural alternative to anti-depressant drugs.

In California, professional longboarder Israel Paskowitz, of the legendary Paskowitz surfing family, discovers that taking his young autistic son surfing dramatically helps his condition. Israel and his wife Danielle soon launch Surfers Healing, a charitable foundation dedicated to introducing autistic children to the calming powers of the waves. In Indonesia, New Zealand born doctor Dave Jenkins takes time out for a surfing holiday in the remote Mentawai Islands. The oppressive health problems of the local people provokes an epiphany that sees Dr Dave throw in his well-paid medical career in Singapore, mortgage his house, and launch a humanitarian aid agency. Surf Aid International soon attracts the support of the world-wide surfing community, drastically reduces rampant malaria in the Mentawais, and comes to the aid of remote island communities devastated by the 2004 Tsunami. In so doing, this tiny group of surfers earns the praise of the World Health Organisation, the US Navy, the UN, and established aid agencies like AusAid and NZAid.

In south-west France, wealthy English industrialist Greville Mitchell takes his wife Liza and surfing sons for a seaside holiday, to coincide with the French leg of the pro surfing tour. He wanders down the beach one afternoon in Lacanau and becomes entranced by the spectacle of pro surfers Luke Egan and Jeff Booth surfing a heat. So mesmerised is Greville by the surfers’ unearthly grace on the waves, he wades waist deep into the ocean, as if hypnotised, to get a closer look. He returns to their holiday apartment wearing soaking trousers and a glazed expression. His wife Liza claims he has never been the same. Greville soon diverts large chunks of his personal fortune into funding a full-time medical team on tour for the surfers, and propping up the sport’s cash-strapped, world governing body. A chronic workaholic, Greville takes up longboarding and credits surfing with literally saving his life.

In Australia, surfwear label Billabong, launched on Gold Coast surfer Gordon Merchant’s kitchen table in 1973, debuts on the stock exchange at $2.30 a share after a massively oversubscribed public float. Five years later, its shares top $15 and are prized blue ribbon stock, while the company founder retires to go surfing at his favourite wave havens around the world, his personal worth estimated at over $500 million. And he’s not alone. A quick scan of the BRW rich list reveals no fewer than 9 of the top 200 wealthiest people in Australia made their fortunes from surfing related enterprises. That’s nearly 5% of the country’s mega-rich. As a “millionaire factory”, surfing holds its own with almost any other business sector.

What is going on here? Weren’t surfers once reviled and despised as drop-outs, drug addicts and threats to public morality? Weren’t parents once aghast at the onset of the dreaded wave riding disease - that rendered the stricken victims useless for all gainful employment, with no hope of a cure?

Today, surfers are respected and admired as highly skilled and well-paid elite athletes, visionary business leaders, creative artists, bold adventurers, all somehow tapped into a seemingly bottomless well-spring of inspiration, good health and vitality. Surfing, it seems, is suddenly everywhere. 2.8 million Australians claim to surf, according to the latest Sweeney Report, the nation’s most comprehensive sports survey. The booming surf school industry introduces another 250,000 newcomers (and rising) to the waves each year, more than half of them female.

Top pro surfers earn more than our leading cricketers and footballers. Boys barely out of their teens - no doubt told they’d never amount to anything if they surfed their lives away - are multi-millionaires with global reach, revered throughout Australia, North and South America, coastal Europe, Japan, Africa and beyond.

Big wave rider Laird Hamilton advertises American Express and his film “Riding Giants” opens the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. Every Hollywood actor and rock star worth their sea salt seems to cite surfing as their chosen recreation. Even if they don’t actually surf, they try to look as if they do. "Seventy-five per cent of the hours I'm in one pair of camouflage swim trunks - no shirt, no shoes. General surfer vibe. I don't surf, but I hang out and look like one," perrenial rock and roll survivor Iggy Pop reported recently.

A new hair product promises “surf hair ... for that just off the beach look.” A business article on share market predictions for 2006 uses an image of a surfer riding a huge wave, with the headline: “Few people saw this year’s market gains coming. Who’s to say the next wave won’t be just as big?” Our two most pervasive forms of technology rely on surfing metaphors - when we “surf the ‘net,” or “channel surf.” Itinerant travellers are said to be “couch surfing”. Surfing seems to be the image, metaphor, and recreation of choice for our times. Why surfing? Why now?

I’d argue, the social shift surfing has undergone over the last 40 years is as dramatic as feminism, the civil rights movement, or the rise of indigenous cultures worldwide. The claims of acid guru Timothy Leary in 1978 don’t seem quite so far-fetched nearly 30 years later: “Surfers are the ‘throw-aheads’ of mankind, not the dregs; they aren’t the black sheep of humanity, but the futurists and they are leading the way to where man ultimately wants to be.”

Leary’s notion of life as a dance, and that surfers had been awoken to this great truth, might seem less like acid-soaked hippy idealism in these increasingly uncertain times, when living in the moment seems an eminently sensible response to the horrors of the nightly news, the threats of global warming and terrorism. This dance, Leary theorised, was the real point of our existence, rather than the grim accumulation of material wealth. And he hoped surfers might awaken wider society to this message - that this in fact was their mission on the planet.

Surfing provides instant meditation. It absolutely requires you remain clear and present, in the moment, in the state yogis call “no mind,” undistracted by thoughts of the past or future. Leary hoped surfers might apply and spread this way of being to life on land. Admittedly, old Timothy consumed vast quantities of lysergic acid, before he had his earthly remains catapulted into outer space. But, presumably, you don’t spend that much time in an altered state without gaining a few insights.

Today, surfing’s influence on mainstream society has never been greater. This acceptance is one surfers have both dreaded and craved - threatening its once maverick counter-culture mystique, while providing career paths and business opportunities once inconceivable. 30 years ago, the Australian Tax Office was incredulous when they first received tax returns with “professional surfer” optimistically entered under “occupation”, sending them back with a curt note that there was no such vocation. Today, surfing significantly improves our country’s balance of payments.

Yet, as surfing’s stocks have risen, it seems its essential teachings are in danger of being lost. As surfing’s influence has grown, we have begun to miss the point. Rather than the mainstream moving towards us - to embrace surfing’s lessons of flow, balance, spontaneity, connection to nature - surfing has moved towards the mainstream instead. Surfers have become more materialistic, scheming, opportunistic, competitive, ruthless - in business, sport and their simple recreation. Surfing is finally getting its message across, but it is the wrong message - one contrived to sell clothing to the masses - a youth fixation, greed, ego, mindless hero worship, and the nonsense that a lifestyle can be acquired through the right arrangement of logos.

The popularity of surfing, growing crowds, and the material rewards it increasingly offers, seem to have drowned out the gentle, soothing, guiding lessons of the sea. It is a very different thing - it is almost a different past time altogether - to sit out at a remote surf break, happily trading waves with friends, as opposed to hassling, squabbling and jockeying for waves at the teeming city beachbreaks most of us surf. It once seemed possible the joy, ease and spontaneity of surfing might begin to inform and overflow into our lives on land. “Simply by surfing, you are supporting the revolution,” ‘66 world champion Nat Young once famously declared. Increasingly, it seems the dog eat dog madness of a work-earn-spend capitalist society has spilled over into the waves.

Many life-long surfers around the world share a sense of mourning, at a loss of innocence, a corruption of our once pure past-time, co-opted by vested business interests more concerned with their bottom line than their bottom turn. Imagine for a moment if yoga, for example, existed purely to sell yoga clothing and products to the masses, and to annoint yoga “champions” in heated competition. Some yogis claim this is precisely what has happened with the corporatisation of yoga in the USA, and the resultant loss or dilution of much of its ancient wisdom. In fact, eminent yogi Swami Rama wrote on just such a topic in 1991: “Like many profound, beautiful, and powerful arts and sciences, yoga has suffered from the spiritual poverty of the modern world—it has been trivialized, watered down, or reduced to cliches. The deep and eternal essence of yoga has been misrepresented and packaged for personal profit by clever people.” Now replace the word “yoga” with the word “surfing” and read it again.

Surfing, in the hands of big business and the competitive machine, seems to have suffered a similar fate. When competition is the model held up for young surfers to aspire to, every surf session becomes a heat drill. Hassling and jockeying for position becomes more important than the joy of the ride and sharing the stoke. Brilliantly talented young surfers swear and punch their boards when they fall off, and walk away bitter and broken when lofty dreams of a professional career fail to manifest. The tide of beginners who have entered surfing in the age of crowds, competition and commercialism believe this is what surfing is about - and earnestly emulate the grim exertions of their heroes. For some, surfing is about dedicated, disciplined, competitive athleticism, and there is nothing wrong with that. But for many others, the great bulk of the surfing population I’d argue, riding waves is something else altogether - sanctuary, therapy, creative self expression, meditation and health tonic all rolled into one blissful watery release from life on land.

I believe surfing can provide a road map, or at leat a guiding star, to one of the most healthy, fulfilling and joyful existences it is possible for a human being to lead on planet Earth. This seems especially true in the early stages of the 21st century - when so much of our adventure, freedom and interaction with the natural world is under threat. The practice of wave-riding teaches balance, flow, connection with nature and an acceptance of the whimsical play of the elements. It tunes us into the cyclical patterns of the planet - seasons and weather systems, swells and tides - what we might consider the earth’s natural pulse. And when we are in touch with the pulse of the planet, perhaps we are less likely to trash the place because we are among the first to register its ill-health first-hand, the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Perhaps, too, it teaches us something about life’s wave-like nature - its peaks and troughs, its sets and lulls, the tides’ ebb and flow. “It’s easy to learn in the ocean. I learned there because you’re very close to nature. You’re in it! You’re immersed in it! You learn to wait patiently. There’s a time for everything to happen. You’ve got to learn to wait for your wave. You can’t make it come to you. It teaches you about life,” Californian surf pioneer Tom Blake once observed.

Modern quantum physics and ancient mysticism alike tell us, all life is made up of waves - light waves, sound waves, radio waves. Even physical matter, what appears solid, is little more than a field of energy, vibrating at a certain frequency. Waves. The ocean surf we ride is the only form this wave energy comes in on a human scale. The waves most of us surf are, on average, around head high. They move about as fast as we can run or paddle a surfboard. In many ways, they can push us close to, or beyond, the limits of our endurance, taking us to our edge, in an intensely physical, spontaneous, non-negotiable exchange. Perhaps, through our interaction with them, we can come to understand much about the nature of wave energy, how to use it to propel us forwards, how to dance amidst its awesome power, how to avoid its potentially destructive force. The ocean, I’ve come to believe, is simply life made visible, a convenient parallel reality where the nature of wave energy is easily observable, its lessons immediate, tangible and powerful.

I’m reminded of a favourite Michael Leunig cartoon - a simple wavy line bissecting the page horizontally, forming a series of peaks and troughs. Atop every peak, a little man strides out confidentally, smiling, chest puffed out. At the bottom of each trough a disconsolate stooped figure trudges dejectedly along. Oblivious to the wave-like nature of existance, each of these characters believes this instant is their whole life - this giddy high or crushing low, this wild descent or daunting climb. When we step back and observe the big picture we realise life almost inevitably consists of hills and valleys, peaks and troughs. Waves. And the surfer of life knows, waves are there to be ridden, to propel us onward. Without this broad vision, life’s ups and downs can end up just feeling like a bumpy road rather than a potential fun park.

I’ve often marvelled at those charmed surfers who seem to always turn up where and when the surf is best, or who paddle out at the precise place and time to catch the day’s biggest and best wave. It is as if their sonar is more finely tuned to the unseen signals these pulses of energy send. I eventually figured, too, that canny business person who buys and sells at the right time, forecasts trends or recognises cycles, is also surfing their life, instinctively shifting to ever-changing circumstances, riding the waves of pitching market forces. What is the successful day trader doing other than recognising peaks and troughs?

I began to suspect that this understanding of wave energy could apply to many areas of life, and that surfers were intuitively in touch with a kind of wisdom that much of the rest of society was trying to learn, that surfers knew things they didn’t even know they knew. And that maybe old Timothy Leary was on to something afterall. Staff writer for the New Yorker Malcom Gladwell, also a leading business consultant, recently published a book entitled, “Blink - the power of thinking without thinking.” In it, he neatly argues the case for the power of snap, instinctive judgements over analytical, reasoned decision making - the very stuff Ross Clarke-Jones preaches to his business clients. Gladwell prescribes getting back in touch with our instincts and intuition and trusting our snap decisions. His ideas are swiftly sweeping and revolutionising the business world, and he consults for major American corporations wanting to intergrate his theories.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (pronounced “Chicks send me high”!) has helped pioneer the study of positive psychology for the past 20 years. His book “Flow - the psychology of optimal experience,” describes something he calls the “flow state” which he believes is the ideal condition for human happiness. The characteristics of the flow state are complete involvement, focus and concentration, a feeling of ecstacy, inner clarity, a sense of serenity even as your skills are tested to their limits, obliviousness to the passing of time, and an appreciation of the activity for its own sake. That is, it doesn’t need to produce anything other than a sense of well-being. It’s a condition that will sound immediately familiar to any surfer.

He based his findings on interviews with thousands of subjects from all walks of life - chess players, rock climbers, musicians, basketball players, doctors - anyone who engaged in an activity that gave them a profound sense of fulfillment. Remarkably, he didn’t speak to any surfers, but he may as well have because his description of the flow state seems to apply to surfing more perfectly than almost any other human activity: “Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless like a flow. You also forget time and are not afraid of being out of control. You think you can control the situation if you need to. But it's hard because the challenges are hard. It feels effortless and yet it's extremely dependent on concentration and skill ... In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on—you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity.”

This absence of thought, this dissolution of our sense of self, is precisely the state of “no mind” yogis cultivate. There are growing bodies of evidence - scientific, meta-physical, spiritual - that this state of no mind is really the optimum condition for our general well-being. Healing, creativity, judgement, response times, performance levels of all kinds, are enhanced when we achieve this state.

Unfortunately for we humans, we have created a world so complex we often feel like we need every ounce of our mental capacities to try and figure it all out. Our lesson may be that we simply can not think and reason our way through the complexities of modern life and have no choice but return to our long dormant instincts. Surfing, I suggest, is one way we can re-learn the art of staying in the moment, trusting our instincts, being present. Wave-riding absolutely requires it. There are plenty of others - almost any activity can be meditative. My goal is not to inspire the whole world to take up sufing. The waves are crowded enough already. It’s tempting to endorse the sentiments of a bumper sticker gaining popularity among surfers in the USA: “Thank you for not surfing.” Yet I temper this urge for exclusivity with the thought that, however much grief that floundering beginner or greedy longboarder may cause you in the surf, they are likely to cause you less grief on land for the very fact that they surf.

Rather, I’d like to suggest that much of what people might be looking for from surfing, in its current vogue, may be accessible all around them in their everyday lives on land - spontaneity, connection with nature, being present in the moment, trusting instincts and intuition - that it is, in fact, possible to surf your life. You can metaphorically paddle into, and take off on, any situation, endeavour, adventure, with the gusto and commitment of the surf rider, take the drop and instinctively read, adapt to, and ride changing circumstances. Poised, senses finely tuned, feeling the shifting terrain under your feet, reacting spontaneously and instinctively to the constant changes. Waves can rear up and heave and lurch threateningly, or peel away with mechanical precision like rolling liquid drain pipes, or loop and roll invitingly like playground equipment. The surfer never really knows what he’s in for as he sizes up a wave, turns and paddles and leaps to his feet, poised to react spontaneously to the shifting path ahead. A lot like life.

The ocean can be seen as a laboratory where rules for living can be tested, with swift and immediate feedback. Might not the principles of wave-riding offer us all a way of living with greater ease, flow, grace, spontaneity and an embrace of the present moment?

Readers may be relieved to learn I do not propose espousing this theory in greater detail for the remainder of this book. This is not another personal development text promising the key to unending wealth, the perfect relationship or dream job - Lord knows, we have enough of those already. I favour the rather less evangelical approach of allowing real human stories to illustrate the virtues of the surfer’s approach to life. What follows are a series of profiles of many of the most inspiring and extraordinary surfing characters I’ve had the good fortune to come across in my work and travels as a surfer and writer over the past 20 years, as well as some of my favourite personal anecdotes and gems of surfing wisdom gathered over that time.

These stories, I hope, help illustrate how life moves on like a series of waves. Or rather, life is the vast ocean, the medium, through which these waves move. And we can learn to ride these peaks and troughs of our daily lives, bringing greater joy, ease and grace to our everyday existence. I invite you to paddle out and enjoy the ride.

Tim Baker, Currumbin, Australia, 2007