From the Oaxaca Coastline, Mexico. Surf Days...
On writing, travel, surf angst, travel conversations
Hi guys,
How bloody hard can writing be?
I peck at the keyboard late, missed personal deadline, (Saturday for Ep. 2), shivering with excusitis, flagellating myself for being slow and indecisive in putting together a string of words for me and you.
As I sat in the water at dawn this morning, an isolated right-hander break called El Faro all to myself and Pablo’s son called Diego, I started writing an essay in my head on why writing is so bloody hard. Turquoise and bathwater warm Oaxaca waters ebbed and flower around my feet, and all I could think about was how the often unflowing staccato of words and sentences and paragraphs emerging is actually a hundred small decisions. And that’s why good writing is in the category of takes-longer-than-you-think….
And so, to a certain extent, fast writing needs a flow of fast decisiveness.
Which is why writing is such a valuable skill to develop. Writing is more like the improvisation of a jazz solo, than the structure of a classical symphony.
Glad to be taking this writing project on again, simply building the skill, the habit, in this wonderful period of career pause.
On Reflection…
I sat in the boarding lounge at SFO, Tuesday 18th July, four days after having launched the travel segment of Rumspringa with buying a ticket to the South West coastal and cultural state of Mexico, the fifth largest, Oaxaca. The dawn light that I so adore cracked over the hills of Mount Davidson and Twin Peaks to the left. Coffee grinders hummed up with long lines to catch first brews at 6am. And the nexus of new journies about to start from that building cracked open my mind to why travel is so invigorating.
At any airport, I’m inspired in some way by the prospect of another journey, ever when you’re exhausted in the hard drive of a business trip. Airports have been part of my life since just after my first birthday, a first long haul flight being Christmas 1976, to be shown off to the wider family in Ireland. And in the last ten years, there may have been years I was on a plane 30-40 times, I’m guessting.
The superpower of travel is how the change of place will change our state in an instant. The movement, the change in environs, the novelty, the new angles on the world coming into view all crack open our faculty of curiosity.
Take-off itself is unfailingly a head warp, a novelty that has never worn off. (But too, it’s one place more than any other that I’ll slip into a short nap, awaking at an angle, emerging above clouds, or with the bing of the seatbelt sign going off and cabin crew starting to appear with the drinks trolley).
Beware novelty wearing off. An art of life, is continually cultivating our faculty of curiosity, per the theme of Autour De Ma Chambre that I wrote about last week.
El Faro and Surf Angst
This photo was taken on my third day of pulling up at El Faro not long after the sun broke over the horizon, having been picked up an hour and a half earlier, at 5am by Pablo Narvaez, our guide from surf travel arranger, Thermal.
It was in the Australian late summer of 2003, living on Maroubra Beach, that I first coined the term surf ‘angst’. It’s that feeling that mounts over days and months, or sometimes even just hours (when you had a great session earlier that day), that you just have to get back in there into the visceral 3D-ness of sitting in the ocean on a surfboard, trying to catch its energy and tame it into your own little experience of flying, and to getting mauled by it in the washing machine drum of a breaking wave.
The word anxiety was hardly used then. Now it feels more common than ‘I have a cold’. We have more than ever before, and we yet we worry more too. I’ll never understand the disease. We’ve lost our minds. And anxiety will reduce standards of living and take more lives in the young than climate change, I’ll happily bet. We can adapt to shifting weather, but it’s much harder to adapt to your own lost mind.
Where we find ourselves being anxious, it’s important to strive to have a sense for how valid the fear is, and how to shift out of it. Every day we wake up in decent health, its a beautiful miracle of experience. And a bottom line for this experience has to be being able to keep a measured mind and some baseline of gratitude and gentle contentment just to have woken up for another chance at a day. Find a wave out of it :) or, your own equivalent (the ocean unfailingly transforms any mopey or agitated head of mine…!).
In Conversation…
Sitting in this roadside cantina on the way to El Faro, I had the most amazing conversation shared, with a stranger sitting next to us.
A week of travel conversations opened up threads around quitting corporate life in your mid-forties (thanks to Denise and John, of Naples Florida), the true story of how a son came about late in life (thanks to Pablo), the extraordinary story of how most young people in coastal regions of Oaxaca have the ambition - and will attempt - to cross the Mexico-US border (going rate today $25,000 for the group escort services that arrange the 3 days and 3 nights walk), thanks to the friend of one of our guides. A truly fascinating discussion that taught me so much, including the misrepresentations of the news. The extraordinary story of the property title fight behind El Faro’s pristine strip of coastline and wilderness, thanks to the guide of another surfer.
It took another question, and another question and another question, before the question “what do you think El Faro will look like in 15 years time?” led to a totally predictable answer. I asked too if it might be five years time that the strip of coastline so rich in wilderness would be fully developed…“absolutely”.
The trip so far has been a reminder of all there is to learn when we double-click with curiosity, in conversation.