Surf’s Up!

A younger friend of mine has been learning how to surf. She returned from the surfing camp she attended in Costa Rica elated – and chastened. On one surfing run, she caught the wave perfectly, and remained steady on the board as the wave swept her across the ocean’s surface. “The speed was exhilarating; I was going so fast!” She was suffused with a sense of accomplishment and joy.

Each evening, the surfers viewed footage of themselves, to check out how they might want to adjust their form and timing. My friend was excited that she’d get to see herself, skimming across the water like quicksilver. “But it wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “What I saw was the surfing equivalent of me taking a stroll in the park.”

I was struck – and so I said – wasn’t it interesting how, after seeing the video, what she saw became truer to her than what she felt?

I thought of her the other day as I got on my bike. I’ve been biking to work most days this summer, trying to get back in the habit. My body is loving it. Sometimes, I push it a little, just to feel my 61-year-old muscles responding. And they do respond. At days end, I feel the good kind of tired.

My body’s returning vitality isn’t obvious from the outside. My outward appearance is still that of a round-hipped, thick-legged 61-year-old woman. When I consider this – the likelihood that my appearance doesn’t square with how I feel – some of the vitality from my bike ride leaches away, and the thought comes, “Don’t get to feeling so good; you wouldn’t feel that good if you knew how you looked to other people.”

What happens when we remember our eyes can deceive us? Or maybe more accurately that our eyes are only one of our senses, and the information they bring is not any more valid than that from the other senses. Inside my friend’s sedate-looking surf run was the rush of pure focus and life! Inside this plump body, my muscles sometimes still rise to the occasion, pedaling me past urban garden patches of corn and squash, chicken coops painted barn-red, and the color-burst of gladioli. If I thought I had to look like Beth Heiden in order to get on my bike, I would miss out on these things.

Maybe as we age, our eyesight worsens and our conspicuousness in the world fades because it’s meant to. We’re not supposed to care as much about how we might appear, because that is so much less important than what’s happening inside of us. We’re not supposed to be so concerned with what we see; what we experience is where the juice is.