Surfing and Failure

Everyone knows failure—whether they vocalize it is another thing. Failure looks differently to different people at different phases and points of life. Regardless, failure is an important part of human growth and creativity. As the writer C.S. Lewis reminds us, “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

Without failure there is no triumph. Without failure there is no progress. Failure can help us overcome obstacles to reaching goals. And though we may never actually attain what we most dearly hope, there are few teachers better than failure.

Failure can be a hard taskmaster, as its whip is sharp and cutting, embarrassment being a chief feeling of the one who has failed. But to embrace one’s failure’s is symbolic of spiritual or character maturity. Those who deny their failures or shortcomings are denying their own humanity—and quite possibility their own betterment.

There is a story about a reporter who asked Thomas Edison if he felt like a failure because he had to try so many times before mastering the science of electricity and its conduction.  Edison responded by saying something like, “I don’t consider those attempts failures but, rather, I discovered 10,000 ways it does not work.”

A couple of weeks ago I paddled out on a new board. It was late in the afternoon. A north swell was dying, ever rapidly, but the waves were holding at chest high. They were lumpy and shifty.

I saw friends from church, Brennan and Maria, surfing next to the pier, so I joined them. It was just us three, until my son, William, paddled out and joined us. We traded waves and watched the gray horizon as the surf rolled slowly with the rising tide.

And I surfed terribly bad. I mean horrible. It had nothing, whatsoever, to do with the new board. It had everything to do with me.

I would start gliding down the face of the wave and then, for different reasons, I would fall. I kept falling. I distinctly remember catching this nice right-hander and trying to make a long arcing cut back—and it was as if I had only started surfing yesterday. Not 35 years ago.

That day, surfing with my son and church friends was an exercise, to some degree, in learning that I wasn’t as accomplished as I imagined myself to be.

The consequence of failure is almost always found in how we perceive it. As I rode my bike home from the evening surf, I had an epiphany, which later proved to be true: The way that I was surfing my new board was not appropriate to the new shape I was riding. I discovered how not to ride the board—and in discovering how not to ride the board, I discovered how best to ride the board.