The Art of Doing Nothing

I discovered surfing relatively late. As a kid growing up on the east coast I'd body surfed daily every summer, but when I first came to California as a young actor I rarely went near the ocean. It wasn't until years later, after I'd returned for a period to New York and then had lived in Italy for almost a decade, that I discovered the joy of the surfboard. It wasn't at all what I'd imagined. With body surfing it's all about the exuberance of grabbing the wave and experiencing the rush through the water, after which you quickly swim back out and grab another wave. With board surfing it's about waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and it's surprisingly joyous. It's zen, really, a bonding with nature that can't be found in many other things. Some will claim it's the same with fishing, but I'd argue that a fisherman is adversarial vis a vis the fish, whereas surfing is passive. You just sit or lie there on the board, gazing toward the horizon, rising and falling with the swells as if feeling the world breathing, lulled by mother earth's ample breast. Every now and then one of those waves breaks just right, and you catch a wild, usually brief ride. The rest of the time you get mellow.