More Life Lessons from Surfing

As a part of my own training, I have been trying not to get angry. I have been consciously trying this for more than a year now, and surfing really has helped me in achieving this. Like surfing, I have not perfected it, but I think I am making a bit more progress than before really starting to make an effort.

Looking back at early days when I started to take up the sport, there were many things that frustrated me, hence I got angry. Many of the situations dealt with when it got really difficult to paddle out or go up on the board. Whenever something bad happened, say, I could not make the outside, or cannot catch the waves, that resulted in frustration, and often blamed the surf board, or the condition, or sometimes the people who happened to be around. But now that I have had a bit of time to reflect on all these situations, I have found out the following stuff that happened in my mind.

First, I thought I was not able to control the situation, but I thought I could. The way I thought I could is to find out the source of the issue; something to blame. Now that I am thinking about this, there clearly were time in point I was thinking that the source of the problem was the surf board, or other people or the condition. Of course, if you are reading this now it might all make sense to you, but if you are in the middle of the situation, it is not that easy to make a head and tail out of it.

Now, several hundred sessions later, it is very clear to me that most of the source of the problem lied within myself, and all of what I was angry at was really not present at that time or even now. I was trying to control the situation where there is nothing I could really control, and hence, the frustration and anger. The fact that I can prove this to myself is that I now have totally different attitude about the situation, because now I am still using similar equipment and going out on similar conditions and with similar crowd as I have been, but I do not get that anger feeling any more. I know how to have fun in crowded situations, they never get me, and I rarely get them, and I know when the board works to let me surf and I know when the board works and when it does not, and when it does not, I know that I can make it work with time and more practices.

And there, I have found much more peace in my mind, and I can really use this to deal with my daily life. I am therefore really glad that surfing is not only helping me stay in shape but also mentally help me grow a bit each day.