Carpe Unda: Seize the Wave
Art designed to inspire perspective and fuel your stoke.
How many waves do you have left in your lifetime?
We’ll use our average Inertia reader as an example, let’s call him Tim, he’s fortunate enough to live close to the sea, his 35th birthday was last week, he’s in good shape, although really feels it after some of the longer sessions. Like most Inertia readers, he made several fairly major life decisions around surfing and carves out time to get salty whenever the local break is firing, which averages out at about once per week in the winter season.
Tim catches 8–10 waves per session if it’s not out of control and he’s able to find a peak away from the main crowds. In the summer months the waves are less consistent, he sneaks away for one ten day surfari further afield if he can negotiate the time off. Tim avoids any major injuries (not that would hold him back) and as the years pass him by, he’s not quite in the same league as Don Wildman but he stays in good shape and on a board with plenty of volume he’s able to paddle out back well into his late 70’s.
Okay, so a generous back-of-the-napkin calculation for Tim our average reader would be 1x weekly surf, catching 9x waves per session for 28x weeks each year for the next 50x years. The generous calculation for our average ocean-frothing reader is that he’ll get to ride about 12,600 more waves in his lifetime. Some lucky or younger groms might get more, and other more land-locked readers might have their numbers in triple digits.
Our Time is Limited
We all have limited amount of time remaining on this planet. We are all visitors here. Talking about death is still mostly taboo in Western Society. I think this needs to change. According to FlowingData, a 27-year-old male has a 5% chance of dying before he reaches 50 years old.
In fact one of the few certainties in life (a cryogenics breakthrough notwithstanding) is that we will all someday pass away. When this happens, the elaborate tapestry of priorities that we’ve spent decades weaving combusts literally into stardust. One day the wave we kick off from will truly be our last. Intellectually we know this, but unless we experience a near death experience (perhaps a brutal 3 wave hold down) lose a loved one or consciously reflect on the limited number of days that we have remaining — it doesn’t really cross our mind.
In fact as default optimists we all tend to imagine the future as if it will occur with complete certainty. The idea that one day we will no longer be here as a conscious, feeling, breathing being is not something that we spend much mental energy contemplating. Shortly before being claimed by the ocean himself, Jay Moriarity shared these wise words:
Why Does this Matter?
As surfers we are generally better than most at appreciating the wonders of life and living in the present. Most of us have had moments when we have been soaked in wonder or feeling as Matt Smith put it, ‘the simple satisfaction of our own mortality’. But we’ve all seen other times at crowded line ups, other surfers bickering in the line-up and think, wow you’ve really lost perspective. I say others, I’ve felt it myself, being frustrated with missing a set wave or making less than generous assumptions about the guy who accidentally dropped in on me. To be clear, I’m not expecting us all to start wandering around in a state of perpetual zen-like gratitude. We’re human and there are always going to be times when we lose sight of the bigger picture. That said, I can’t help but feel that when we feel a lack of stoke it’s generally little more than a lack or perspective.
5,200 dots: One For Each Week of Your Life
The world’s most famous stick-figure artist Tim Urban created this Your Life in Weeks wall chart. I loved the concept but something about the squares of squares, organised symmetrically didn’t feel like something I would want to hang on my wall, let alone be the representation of all the cumulative time that I had spent on the planet. So I set out to create a new your life in weeks chart for those who love the ocean. The wave itself is made up of five thousand two hundred circles, so assuming that you get to live to be 100, you have one empty circle for each week of your life. You can buy a print of the blank 5,200 dot wave here.
This post originally appeared over on The Inertia
