I got my first surfboard for my 11th birthday.
My dad left work early to drive me to Huntington Beach, where a blue and white G&S thruster longingly awaited my selection on the used surfboard rack. We walked to the beach straight from the surf shop, my tiny hands keeping the board balanced on my head. My dad said he couldn’t get his first board under his arm, either, and that I should just ignore the other kids confidently making the trek around us.
That was his only advice for my first time trying to surf. He watched from the sand as I struggled to get to my knees, in between relentless shore-break beatings. My matchstick arms gave out in short order, and I rode in on my belly, dejected and embarrassed. I rolled off the board and onto the sand, where my dad was waiting with one of his trademark casual, poignant observations.
You didn’t stand up.
I had nothing against the bodyboarders out there, flying past me prone on their yellow Mach 7s with the slick black bottoms. But we weren’t here for that.
My dad surfed.
And I was 11 now.
Eleven, saltwater burning eyes, blood rushing through little veins.
Eleven, unable to articulate the hollow uncertainty I found between leaving the safety of my knees and standing on my own two feet, too young to diagnose the risk festering in that purgatory, under the watchful eyes of my dad, with my own fragile confidence hanging in the balance.
Eleven, time to be (not even close to) a man.
And stand up.
Thing is, no one ever showed me how to do that. All these years later, I’m still self-taught, which assumes the self actually knows how to teach. And if to assume is to make an ass out of u and me, in this self-taught scenario, the u would also be me. Which means I’d spent most of my life in the water making this particular self twice as big of an ass.
I realized this recently when I cashed in a thoughtful (and brutal) birthday present, and took a lesson from a former pro about half my age. The first thing he said when I got out of the water was
You know, you could be having a lot more fun.
I already knew some bad habits had been seeded forty years before in Huntington Beach, and that they now ran so deep they weren’t even habits anymore.
They were part of me.
But the changes he asked me to make before our next lesson, in the name of having a lot more fun, would mean that I was going to have to actually learn to be different.
Have you ever tried that?
It’s no fun at all.