When I go for a surf, Im wondering what it would feel like to be riding something else. Anything else. What is there? Long, shortie or a mid-range compromiser, Im never satisfied with anything anymore anywhere. Ive constructed my own equipment and paid a kings ransom for the best shapers in the world to create something fresh. Just for me. Mine usually surfed as well as theirs. Ive traveled to where others have gone and quite a lot of other places that few will ever dare to venture. Surfing in the tropics, and third world nations is evil if you stop and think about the big picture. Its sad the way those poor people live and die. Those places are all the same after awhile. Desperate and diseased. Its not at all what the clothiers and board dealers in the magazines are trying to sell you. If you live in a hopeless polluted urban jungle then the real jungle looks like a teenage fantasy, right? Its not. After who knows how many flawless offshore bluegreen walls, its embarrassing to admit that Ive begun to have some fun (?) in choppy grey slop. I know thats pathetic. Something is seriously wrong with me and Ive half-wondered if Im becoming senile. The accumulation of personal wealth has never been an issue. I have 10 lifetimes worth and more. I have no attachments or heirs. During the last 25 years Ive sacrificed and destroyed every relationship in my life on the altar of the next perfect wave and never looked back. Ive allowed nothing to interfere with my hopes and dreams. Ive taken whatever my heart has desired and more. After absorbing so much of what life has to offer, why do I feel so empty? Sure my life has been one hell of a sexy bitchin ride. The finest wine, women and song wherever I happened to be. The best of the best. What a glorious ride Ive had! But somewhere along the way my "stoke" somehow became a faded old memory. Im wondering now what I`ve gone and done to myself. Is that all there is?
assuming there’s any truth to this tale of woe, you need to: 1) make some attachments. If you have none, of course your life feels empty. 2) if you have 10 times what you need, give away 9/10ths of it. Go to those diseased backwaters you’ve visited and give money to a clinic or hospital. Give your boards to the kids who can’t afford one. 3) broaden your horizons. If surfing doesn’t make you happy anymore, don’t surf now, try something else for a while. Learn to do something new, music, dance, paint, fly, dive, write, teach, paddle a canoe, whatever.