The Value of Surfing

What exactly makes being in the water feel so calming and other-worldly? This is a question I routinely ask myself. I hate to admit it, but I sometimes try to get out of surfing when I am feeling lazy or haven’t surfed in a while. I forget the mixture of satisfaction, exhaustion, and exhilaration I feel during and after a surf session. But as soon as I am in the car, I get excited and remember that I love surfing because it is something I do only for myself and won’t be judged on. I turn on the radio while my dad drives, and I am certain that I won’t regret going surfing. I know that I am headed to do a sport that will challenge me physically and restore me mentally.

“Surfing is one of those useless sports—it has no value to society,” said Patagonia founder and lifelong surfer Yvon Chouinard. When I first read this quote, I felt defensive about my experience with surfing because I think that surfing brings incredible value to society. It teaches us valuable lessons. I remember to appreciate mother nature and her creation and her power. Waves can pull you under and toss you around. It is frightening and disorienting. Staying calm will use less energy. Don’t fight mother nature; let her pass.

Maybe surfing brings more value to ourselves than to society. But that is ok. There should be some activities that we do just for ourselves. Surfing is restorative. It nourishes the mind and the body, and pushes us to work harder when we are out of paddle shape, usually rewarding us for our efforts.

Being in and around the water changes me completely - my mindset, my mood, my perspective on the day or even life. I catch myself using the same vague phrases that most surfers use to express how surfing impacts me - “time seems to stop,” “the world falls away,” “all of my anxieties just go away” and so forth. But feelings sometimes just can’t be explained in words. One of the strangest phenomena for me is how I can’t ever remember exactly how I caught a wave. I’ll remember paddling for it and riding it, but the actual catching part gets skipped. I go from paddling really hard and checking every millisecond where the wave is to see if I am still in the right position to an instant later being popped up on the board and riding it. I don’t have to think about popping up; my muscle memory takes over and does it for me. The lapse in memory may be because so little time is passing that my brain didn’t capture the small instance when I caught the wave. It’s still strange to feel like that moment is lost.

Time both slows down and speeds up when I am surfing. It seems to slow down when I am paddling, because matching my paddling with the speed of the wave is tiresome and feels neverending. But it speeds up in the moments where I either catch the wave or don’t. The world definitely does seem to fade away, and with that my worries of the day. My focus becomes much more intense and directed. Once I’ve caught the wave, an obstacle course full of kelp and people emerges that I must navigate. I can vaguely hear my dad and friends cheering behind me, but the crashing wave beneath me is far more deafening. Doesn’t that in and of itself sound other-wordly? There is a wave breaking beneath me. There is a body of rushing water that has swollen up and is right now breaking beneath me and I am riding that body of water. You can’t fly on a cloud or ride a mountain, but you can surf the ocean.

Sofia McGee, 2022

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