Good advice......................

 7.  Surf the craziness with the agility of someone who hates things being too dull.

-More tips for the good life here

lightness about being.................

     This brings us to the main result of our inquiry.  Sartre seems mistaken about human nature.  He puts freedom before flow.  The surfer suggests that flow comes first.  Flow is a matter of attunement to what lies beyond the self, and it is through attunement that we find full freedom and contented peace.
      Angst is not our natural state but socially induced, by a cultural requirement such as the Protestant work ethic.  For Sartre, out anxious culture simple reflects our anxious selves.  Our need to be seen, loved, validated, and Instagram "liked";  our ceaseless preoccupation with self-presentation in social media postings, fashion choices, and displays of wealth, of sex appeal, of intellectual plaudits, or of taste—these are mainly public expressions of our "being-for-others" that anyway would haunt our private thoughts.  We each hope to recognize ourselves in the gaze of others but find ourselves in fraught, even hellish, conflict, always denied mutual recognition and lasting peace.  For the surfer, our natures and our social dynamics are less fixed.  Our attunement to others or to our natural environment can certainly be spoiled in a confused culture.  But it can equally be eased and drawn forth in cooperative practice.  Our driven, time-is-money work culture is a disability for living.  But we can lessen the demands of work, in a shorter workweek, and our anxieties can be reduced.  The surfer's lightness about being could be for all of us.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

transcendence.................

     In surfing and in life, it's true that one can't have a "too willful will," as the Zen master says.  One won't be very well attuned to things beyond oneself without paying careful attention to them, and it is difficult to pay close attention to other things if one is preoccupied with oneself.  Perhaps one need only withdraw certain "attachments" consistent with one's aim of hitting the target, such as an attachment to performing well, or to winning, or to pleasing one's parents or oneself.  But Zen seems to require more, and indeed nothing less than "withdrawing from all attachments whatsoever, by becoming utterly egoless: so that the soul, sunk within itself, stands in the plentitude of its namely origin."
     Surfing simply can't be so exactingly ego-free.  No aquatic movement is so fixed to permit falling into a fully passive state;  there's no time for not actively adapting.  If you had to find a trance state or wakeful dream sleep, and the wave's next movement was coming quickly, you'd eat it, or quickly become out of sync.  The bodily dynamism and moment by moment demands on one's attention naturally draw one's consciousness out into the waves, away from oneself.  But this ego transcendence serves the surfer's active purposes, of being adaptively attuned.  If that isn't Zen, it's a blessedly easy way of being while doing.

-Aaron James: Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

the grace needed...................

Value is, at bottom, simple.  The balance of values is complex, and how to trade them, to choose the worthiest course, is the problem of how to live.  Life has its absurdities, which we might expect and find humor in.  As for the meaning of life itself, in human history, we have yet to formulate an answer.  But we have found good enough reasons to potentially find meaning in our own situation, enough so as to find personal peace.  We needn't resign from life or withdraw, but can instead ready ourselves for being ever more attuned, in faithful practice.  For the basic joy in the surfer's kind of relational connection, even in an ordinary surf, is a real basis for peace in the sublime mix of the beautiful and the grotesque, of the fortunate and the unfortunate, of the just and the unjust.   One can relax the perfectionist scruples, ease up on the angst, and be less anxious.  One can get stoked and simple engage in worthy activities that give one the grace needed to call the present good enough within a life that's being well lived.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Just go with the flow...............

     Surfing has superb experiential flow qualities.  You often surf better if you think less and let the surfing come, maybe coaching yourself with "Okay, don't get bogged down in technicalities; just go with the flow."  When things are really coming together in a session or over a week, the flow experience comes on in full force.  You surf your best without trying, doing fluid, radical turns, which start feeling automatic, as though you are watching them just happen.  Time seems to slow.  You feel open, connected, empathetic, and yet effectual, in riding along with the physical liquid flow that is a breaking wave.  Those times of peak attunement are also fleeting.  No less important are the ordinary days, in ordinary waves, with all the mellow and harmonious feelings, the sheer fun and beauty of the deed, the pleasantness of being immersed in salty air, a wispy breeze, and glassy, gently shifting,  luminously reflecting seas.  "It's good just to get wet" is what surfers say.  You need it, often if not daily, to feel sane and stay stoked.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

... what is easily missed................

     Still, why go to all this trouble?  The unexamined life is certainly worth living; an unreflective surfer should keep on surfing until the last of his or her blessed days.  Why then devote a life to formulating answers to questions that may not have what people would readily call "answers"?   For me at least, the value in philosophy and in surfing is not so different.  Both are fun!  But more to the point, waves and ideas are often sublime, or beautiful, or both, and in patiently attending to them, you see and feel ever more of what is easily missed.  You gain ever deeper understanding, ever greater attunement, in your thinking and your actions.  The superficiality of life, the mania for status or money or power, along with its contagious anxieties, then fades into the background, becoming white noise in a peaceful life lived by its own joyous music.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Still surfing.........................

... surfing a wave has a distinctive kind of value.  Being adaptively attuned to a changing natural phenomenon, in part, by not needing to control it, is at once a kind of freedom, self-transcendence, and happiness.  Or so I will argue in later chapters.   To a surprising degree, I submit, what is valuable in human life is a matter of being adaptively attuned - a way of "surfing," in an extended sense.
    To surf, in general, is to be adaptively attuned to a changing pheomenon beyond oneself, for its own sake.  In a social form of adaptive attunement, you could "surf" through a conversation, a meeting at work, or a crowded street, going along with the flow of conversational or meeting dynamics, by staying attuned to other people and responding fluently in each new moment of cooperation.  Whatever else you might hope to achieve, you'd do that purposefully, with a certain awareness of its intrinsic value, partly for its own sake.  You'd give up seeking control, perhaps in order to keep cooperative relations sweet, for the feelings of harmonious social connection and the consequent sense of peace.

-Aaron James, Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Broken rules......................................

     If a complete book of surfing's rules could be written, it wouldn't necessarily help unless you could also learn the "know-how" that comes in faithful practice. You could read and understand all of its instructions, grasp them intellectually, and still not know how to put any rule into action.  As a new wave situation presents itself, you have to know how to go on in the next moment.  To borrow from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the enigmatic early mid-twentieth-century philosopher, if rules were all you had to go by, they couldn't tell you how to "go on" from what came before, even with suggestive coaching.  Given only rules, with no further sense of how to apply them to a fresh particular moment, you'd have to look to further rules to tell you which rules to follow and when.  But then you'd also need rules for following those rules, and so on, without end, ad infinitum, all the way up.   Which is absurd, or impossible, or just not what we do in learning to surf.


-Aaron James,   Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Well, isn't it..............................

Nowadays, in our more leisurely style of capitalism, the workaday surfer can be found at surf breaks the world over, stoked in gushing exuberance about the better waves of the day, feeling lighter about the stresses of work, acting as if the whole meaning of human existence can be found in the simple act of riding a wave.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Surf's up...................................

The Chantays..................................................................Pipeline

churned up...............................

“There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water’s waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.” 

-Jon Kabat-Zinn