Surfing and Fulfillment

I see sunlight penetrating the curl as it bends to break. I make it to the shoulder of the wave, cut back to meet the curl, stall, go high and begin walking to the nose. Then I back-peddle, finishing the ride by jumping off, the wave snatching my board and washing it onto the beach with a scraping sound. A little girl ­– no more than five years of age, with white blonde hair and a red bathing suit­–is collecting shells near my board. She stops, looks, smiles, and points to my board lying on the sand. Her mother walks over, crouches in a black bikini, and along with her daughter, watch as I pick the board up and paddle back out. I can’t help but wonder if I am the first surfer the little girl has ever seen.

The first time I saw a surfer was in the mid- to late-1970s . It was at Crescent Beach. I recall watching him surf only one wave. But 45 years later I still remember that day. Surfing spoke to me. Maybe surfing will speak to the little girl in the red bathing suit. Things either speak to us or they do not. And sometimes something that did not speak to us when we were children will speak to us later in life. And sometimes something that spoke to us when we were children will no longer speak to us as we age. Different things at different times give us meaning.

As I paddle back out through the calm emerald water, I glance to the beach and see the little blond girl and her mother, both hunched-over like migrants picking potatoes, dropping one shell after another into a bucket. They search for the perfect shell even as I look to the horizon for the perfect wave.

Looking for waves is a pretty good metaphor for life. To some degree, we all make our way through life looking for that perfect wave—or, at least, we are almost always searching for something to add meaning to our lives. We constantly survey life in hopes of finding that one thing that will remove us from the ordinary and lift us to some lofty place where our deepest hunger calls out. We look to new surfboards, waves, cars, clothes, ideas, lovers, homes, clothes, friends, money, food, work, music, art, politicians, political parties, alcohol, animals, and to our children in hopes of finding something that will quell our angst or lift our spirits.

And therein lies the crux of the problem: We look to things and to people to fill a hole in our souls that only God can fill. As long as we look to things and people to fill an inner void, we will be like children searching for shells on a beach. But the beach will have no shells and our buckets will remain forever empty.