Catching Waves: A Surfer Romance

I'd never taken a vacation longer than a week until the summer I turned forty.

My name is Adrian Park. Investment banker, New York based, the kind of career that eats your life and spits out money as compensation. I'd been doing it for eighteen years, and somewhere along the way I'd forgotten what I was working toward. The corner office? Got it. The Manhattan apartment? Got that too. The relationship, the hobbies, the actual living? Those had been casualties.

My therapist suggested a sabbatical. "Three months," she said. "Go somewhere you've never been. Learn something new. Remember who you are when you're not working."

I chose California. Specifically, a small beach town near San Diego where a former colleague had a vacation home. And because I apparently couldn't do anything without a goal, I decided to learn to surf.

Kai was the instructor assigned to me by the local surf school. Early thirties, born on the islands but raised in California, with the kind of golden tan and easy smile that made me immediately self-conscious about my pale, desk-bound body.

"You ever been in the ocean before?"

"Pools. Business trips to Miami. I stayed at the hotel."

"So that's a no."

"That's a no."

He grinned, handed me a board. "This is going to be fun."

The first week was humbling. I fell off the board approximately a thousand times. Swallowed enough salt water to fill a swimming pool. Got knocked around by waves that Kai described as "barely ankle-slappers." Every muscle in my body ached in ways I didn't know muscles could ache.

But I kept going. Every morning at six, meeting Kai at the beach, paddling out into the cold Pacific. Something about the failure felt different than failure in my professional life. Less personal. More educational.

"You're trying too hard," Kai told me on day eight. "You're treating the wave like something to conquer. It's not. It's something to join."

"That sounds like something from a self-help book."

"It's something from surfing. The ocean doesn't care about your ambition or your plans. You have to meet it where it is, not where you want it to be."

I thought about that while I fell off the board for the hundredth time. Met it where it is. I'd spent my whole career forcing things, bending situations to my will. Maybe that's why I was so bad at this, I didn't know how to work with something instead of against it.

Week two, something clicked. I caught a wave, really caught it, rode it for maybe five seconds before wiping out, and when I surfaced, Kai was whooping from the beach.

"That's it! That's the feeling!"

It was. For five seconds, I'd stopped fighting and started flowing, and the wave had carried me like I belonged there.