All quotes from
Aaron's book
Freedom, for the
surfer, isn't radical self-determination but a kind of achievement, in adaptive
attunement. It's a way of being
efficacious without control, precisely by giving up any need for it.
Surfers go along
with the flow of a wave by intuitive sensing, by attuning to their surroundings
with their whole bodies and not simply their brains or eyeballs. This turns out to be the highest expression
of human perceptual capacity, the human's way of at once being and doing. …
This is a relatively easy route to self-transcendence, thank goodness. Attunement comes by faithful practice, but
without the Buddhist's hard road to enlightenment, the abnegation of desire,
any radical loss of the self, and without all the effort in constant
"mindfulness", or in striving for personal perfection. The surfer just goes surfing and with relative
ease transcends him-or-herself in a dynamic, attuned bodily relationship to the
world outside.
Surfing is less a
matter of asserting one's will than of transcending it, by standing ready to
revise one's best-laid plans, according to what the ocean is offering. And unless one surfs from a sense of one's
relative powerlessness, one simply can't attunedly adapt to each coming moment
of wave.
"Power
surfing" comes not from will power, or mere force, but from perception,
intuition, and anticipation -- from one's sense that the ocean and its waves
are to be not controlled but respected, and so read and answered, in an
adaptive relationship.
The surfer wisdom
for success as a person is this: Take it easier. Accept. Persist. Focus.
Leave time. Don't compare. And mix things up.
There will be good
luck and bad luck, and the thing to do, in either case, is accept what has
happened and flow through the different moments, in each case doing the next
right thing. This is how to "create
your own luck" -- with no magic, no powers to control the future through
"intention" in some more mystical sense. Simply persist in attuned adaptation. Focus on something worthy, and stick to a
rough plan for its realization, while staying open to its gradual refinement or
its deeper reconceptualization. Trust
your noticing.
Success comes
precisely by giving up the aim of control and staying attuned, even in wait.
The thing to do when
a frustrated desire persists -- "the middle way"-- is to simply
accept that much unhappiness: to be as happy as you can be by being willing to
be as unhappy as you are.
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.
The attuned surfer
and the attuned jazz player both mix passive waiting with active, present
sensing, in a spontaneously adaptive activity founded on good timing.
Surfers often wonder
in completely earnest puzzlement what in the world non-surfers are doing with
their time.
With each new habit
that I "hand over to the effortless custody of automatism" by
practicing often, my thoughts are further freed fro the next level of
attainment. I can now pay even more
exquisite attention. The more I
practice, the freer I am to take in new facets of my wave situation, and I
become ever more attuned. This is the
ordinary basis of self-transcendence.
Surfer
self-transcendence has a mundane foundation, in showing up to surf, day after
day, in the routine of everyday practice.
The extraordinary thus depends on the ordinary, and if one loves the
ecstatic, one also must honor its sturdier basis.
All sensing, all
perceptual awareness, is a matter of being embodied in a particular situation
and knowing how to attunedly adapt one's body to one's environment. That is, seeing wouldn't always come first,
with action following. Action would also
shape seeing, or rather seeing would be action.
Consciousness is
always consciousness of or about something else.
Being lost in a
moment, ideally with no thought of ourselves, is anguish's medicine.
Being and staying
present, especially while waiting, is improvisation's active motion, the very
action of attunement.
Because we see
ourselves through the eyes of others, they have power to deny us the identity
we'd like for ourselves.
Goodness and beauty
come above everything, except for justice.
A flow is only as
permanent as its underlying structure, and so may or may not be lasting or
dependable.
The meaning of life
is actually easy to answer, because mis-framed.
It only seems difficult because we mistakenly assume that there has to
be one meaning that explains all the rest.