Surfing – A Metaphor for life

A wise poet once said, you’ve got to catch the wave, to enjoy the ride. You’ve got to hold on to come out the other side.

Surfing – like life, is about timing.  When an opportunity rises, you have choices. You decide to wait, or you decide to go. You have people around you making similar choices. You need to know when to be aggressive and when to be humble. Sometimes your leap of faith pays off and you are rewarded and sometimes you fall short and you are punished.

It is the process of this intense decision making that polishes your senses and helps you in your day to day life. You have little time to think and often it is your fear that propels you.

But what if you never decided to go? There are advantages in playing things safe and waiting for your opportunity. But what if your chance comes and you bob upwards in its motion, but you don’t act on it. If you don’t catch the wave you don’t take the ride.

And this goes beyond surfing. When you are standing at the top of a ski run and suddenly you realize the steepness of the pitch, means you can’t see the bottom. You begin to question why you are there, maybe you don’t belong with this group. You either decide to go, or you take the easier way down. Ahh the decisions… not to mention the obstacles you have to over come once you make your choice. The trees, the snow conditions… often the bigger the risk, the bigger the pay off.  Its these scenarios that build us up and make us more effective at making decisions in all aspects of what we do.

In the end it comes down to what kind of life you want to live.

Hunter S Thompson once asked, “Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

Well put.