Surfing, God and Perfection

Like a child waiting for Christmas, I wait for another wave. The waiting for a wave never gets tedious because every surfer carries hope in his or her chest, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. We are ever hopeful sitting on our boards, long or short. Hoping for that perfect wave, which is ultimately an illusion of sorts, like every other construct of perfection.

Perfection does not exist, except in God. That said, one might argue that every wave is perfect, in so far as it is what it was generated to become. Each wave is exactly what the physics of its energy, contours of the bottom, swell direction, and wind determine it to be. It, the wave, is itself—no more and no less. In this respect, its’ “waveness” is perfect. We would do well to emulate waves—to be ourselves and ourselves alone, sans all pretense and affectations. Arguably, there may be no more important ingredient to emotional, psychological, and spiritual growth than the choice to be who God created us to be—ourselves.

The perfect wave may or may not exist. But perfection, if it does exist in any form outside of the abstract, exists solely in the eye of the one observing a wave, a piece of art, a flower, or a person. Perfection is a state of mind—not a realized form of being.

But that doesn’t keep me, or any other surfer, from looking for the perfect wave. I have experienced moments of wave-perfection surfing a tiny peeler on my local sandbar and a double-overhead reef break in Hawaii. The feeling of the glide—surfing—determines the perfection of the wave—not simply the shape of a wave. If the feeling of a particular glide reaches our standard of perfection then the wave is considered to be perfect, more or less. But a wave is always, in and of itself, as perfect as anything on earth. It is our experience of the wave that determines our perception of its possible perfection.

Today, on waist-high waves with chilly gunmetal skies, the sense of perfection comes to me, not in the glide itself because the glides are short, but in waiting for the glides. As the sun peeks from behind the clouds, I notice beads of ocean water stuck on my black wetsuit like rain drops or diamonds. I notice that I can almost see my reflection in the drops of ocean water. This strikes me as profound—something of a perfect moment: to see oneself in a drop of the ocean.

I wonder, what would it be like if we tried to see each other, all of us God’s children, as different waves upon a common sea, each of pulsing toward the beach as we were created to be?  What a different world this would be.