I am resting my weight on my surfboard, waiting for a wave, enjoying the sensation of the sand between my toes. It is a glorious day—too glorious, in fact, for a British summer, but I bid the climate catastrophe from my mind and allow myself to enjoy the sun on my face for a moment (through three layers of factor 50 sunscreen, of course).
The preceding months have been some the most harrowing of my life, and as the water laps around me, I do not feel my stress and sadness wash away with it. But I do feel held by the sea and have a sense that my own suffering is part of the eternal ebb and flow of the natural world. When I get on my board, I surrender completely to this awesome force, to the power of the waves that occasionally send me into a washing machine spin.
I am riding on a high this morning, because something unexpected happened when I first got into the water. Without thinking, I caught the first wave that I saw, popped up onto my board, and rode confidently to the shore, composed and balanced. It was only when I dismounted in the shallows that I realised what had just happened: I had become a surfer!
This should not have come as a surprise to me, as I have been taking surfing lessons on and off for almost a decade. My annual stints in the sea have persisted throughout my rather chaotic twenties—including, notably, the one in 2022, which made me realise I had fractured my wrist a week earlier playing football (I couldn’t bear my weight on the board).
As well as long, my journey with surfing has been meandering. When I first got in the waves, all those years ago in Newquay at the prompting of a friend, it was immediately obvious that I was not a natural. I have never been a particularly strong swimmer, having been unable to learn as a child due to a skin condition, and have weak, flimsy arms. Learning to surf requires the ability to carry and handle an 8ft board in choppy water, and to have the strength to propel yourself
onto it.
In those first few lessons, I found myself getting easily frustrated, especially when some of my friends seemed to leap up onto their boards effortlessly. By the end of that first week, I had nothing to show for my hours spent thrashing around, apart from having taken an impressive amount of salty water up my nose.
But, along with the frustration, I also felt invigorated and alive. When our teacher took us “out back” behind the waves one morning, a seal glided past me and I have never felt more part of nature. I decided then that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t stand up, or catch any waves—learning to surf was a great excuse to spend time in the magnificent blue.
And so, I resolved to be a permanent beginner—to surf badly at every opportunity I could find. I trekked to Cornwall every year and plunged myself in with little sign of improvement. My moments of success were fleeting, as newly gained skills seemed to disappear as quickly as they had arrived.
But, in fact, these spurts forward, followed quite literally by me falling backwards, were part of a gradual process that would eventually deliver the outcome I wanted—being able to surf. Slowly, one tiny annual chunk at a time, I was building muscle memory and an understanding of the sea.
This embrace of a beginner’s mindset is very different to the way I have approached all other sporting and extracurricular endeavours throughout my life. Like so many of us, I am usually brilliant at turning my efforts to learn something new into a stick with which to beat myself, demanding progress from myself at an unrealistic pace.
If you want to improve your mental health, I recommend starting a hobby that you want to master but allowing yourself to be a permanent beginner. I have gained years of joy from surfing, even if you can’t see those years of experience in my stance on the board. And if you see me falling into the water in Newquay, mind your business! I’m only doing it for a laugh, anyway.
