Surfing Your Thoughts
An ocean obsession, saudade, and the wave of life
This was published a while ago on my Substack for Portuguese-speakers, but the reflection still feels so deep and true, especially now that I’m living by the ocean, that I felt like sending to you on this day of a Solar Eclipse in Aquarius.
A Tale of Saudade and the Ocean
We had barely parked the car, and the thick Atlantic Ocean breeze was already making us salty. It was March in the Northern Hemisphere, very cold in that corner of Portugal coast, near Peniche. I wore a long moss-green waterproof coat, the kind that gives just enough comfort to a heart filled with saudade.
Saudade (noun) in Portuguese means yearning for something so indefinite as to be indefinable: an unrestrained indulgence in yearning. (Oxford English Dictionary)
Even though the parking lot didn’t yet offer much of a view, I took my shoes off and walked barefoot to the beach to ground in life.
I spotted a trail that made me feel home. It was very similar to the ones in Florianópolis, the city I’m from. I didn’t hesitate to step into the icy sand, minerals rising through my pores. The path was short. Soon I stood before the ocean beast. To my right, a crescent moon shone above the coastal hill, as if it were an ornament at the top of a Christmas tree. To my left, a few surfers savoured the sea.
In front of me, the sun, the spectacle, the water so bright it shimmered like a jewel; ready to grant wishes. My eyes could hardly believe it. The sun was setting into the ocean! A lifetime in the Southern Hemisphere had taught me it was where the sun rose. But there it was. The sea swallowing the sun, and night arriving in a tangerine spectacle no IMAX screen in London could ever recreate.
I cried a long-held cry.
I had so much saudade.
Saudade for silence, for stillness, for blueness, for a slow life, for acknowledging, really acknowledging, that nothing will ever be the same way it once was.
I returned to London determined to find a bond with the ocean, and with the peace I had rencountered in Portugal. So I started having these visions about surfing. “Be a surfer in London? Impossible,” someone spit it out to me as if I was mad. But sometimes you have to ignore other people’s beliefs and be a realist who believes in miracles.
A little research led me to a surfskate community — a type of skateboard designed to mimic the movement of surfing, creating the sensation of riding waves on concrete. I showed up to the gathering of the so-called Concrete Waves, embarrassed. I knew little about surfing and nothing about skating. Within hours, I learned to stand, to carve left and right. A few weeks later, I had my own board, and there I was, surfing the concrete streets of London.
I met surfers in London who jump into flights to Morocco as soon as they can. Surfers who live in Cornwall. Surfers from Portugal, Spain, some moving to Mexico. Surfers from Hawaii, just passing through. And I kept surfing the streets with my Mick Fanning board, watching surfing competitions on YouTube, taking lessons at the artificial pool of waves in Bristol, and at some point finally being able to spend two weeks immersed at Santinho beach in Brasil.
And still, my longing for the ocean was unquenched. I felt like I had to live inside it.
Until one day, trying to accomplish a shamata session (a Tibetan meditation practice) I opened a book to contemplate a Buddhist teaching (part of the practice itself):
“When you are fully present in each experience and in each transition, you remain close to your essence. It is like riding a wave. You stay right in the centre of the movement, alongside the force of the wave as it rises and falls. If you move ahead or lag behind, if you separate from the wave, you will fall — you’ll lose it. This way, you can learn to ride the wave of the thought process without losing wisdom.” (Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, Gates to Buddhist Practice)
Perhaps that’s what the obsession with the sea, surfing, and skating was trying to teach me all along. Perhaps I had to look at my thoughts as if they were waves, instead of obsessing with an ocean I didn’t have in the city where I lived at the time.
I discovered the better of a thought surfer you become, the more present you stay in life. Whether you’re carving the wave or riding deep inside the barrel, you stay in the centre until you master the whole thing… until you surf your thoughts like a pro riding Pipeline in Hawai’i, or the giants of Nazaré.
— How would it be like to surf your thoughts?
Not ahead of them, not behind. Right here, alongside the force of the wave of life.
🌊
With amor,
Julia