What Was I Thinking When I Dreamt Up Unleash Surf?
My brain blew up with emotion the other day when an amazing applicant turned the table on me with a simple question: Why did you start Unleash Surf?
Unprepared for the lump in my throat, I blurted out a professional but inadequate answer. But the truth is, the idea of Unleash is built on my own journey to live life with courage and realness.
It’s time I share what I wrote a couple days after the idea was born three years ago — as it best describes the core of what Unleash Surf is all about: Living the lifestyle I’ve always wanted
Right now this hobby-polyamorous gal has 4-months to live experiment #1 of the lifestyle I’ve always wanted
I’m bikini clad for the winter in a fruit filled surf-town in Northern Peru, accompanied by the love of my life. The emotional roller coaster of work, winter and a province eating its creative class is a distant thought.
With no social life and only a few responsibilities in tow, it would seem that I have all the space in the world to indulge in happy hobbies that I’ve been neglecting for decades.
I start by obsessing about a shades-of-grey MC Escher jigsaw puzzle.
With wine in hand and a mélange of marching-band cumbia and pentecostal gospel drifting in the window, I mechanically fit pieces together and throw down some emphatic “A-has! Take that Escher!” And when I sleep, I dream about all the sections I am going to outsmart tomorrow.
Then I ACTUALLY FINISH A BOOK! Hold onto your hats: I’m also thinking of writing a letter! I sign up for a creative writing course and, after a ten-year hiatus, I restring my classical backpacker guitar with ambitions of reading music again.
Along with thousands of others, I start the online-course on Mi’kmaw history. I’m moved by the silence, rage, pride and relief that is being released in me, and hopefully many others, by the mighty teachings of its instructor.
The awakening piles on
I blow the minds of my hibernating taste buds with cherimoyas, mangos, tomatoes, baby-bananas, pineapple, avocados that were probably picked yesterday. I indulge in my fantasy of being in the specialty health-food industry so I can travel organic markets of the world. I plot ways to up my certifications to be a healthy built environment consultant. I imagine starting a business that takes small groups of freelance-working surfers to perfect places to work remotely.
These are among dozens of schemes that are designed when I have the space to defibrillate my regular routine.
The superabundance of possibilities often makes it impossible to pick one thing and stick with it, and I end up feeling disappointed in myself for not completing things.
But the sensual, intellectual, emotional and creative stimulation that I get here, and in most places that aren’t home, more than make up for that. I feel like every pore in my brain is taking full breaths.
Here, I get to eat like a health queen, think in another language, meet people I have much to understand about, befriend others as crazy as me, try foods I don’t understand, observe things that repattern my brain, walk or bus to everything, reconsider assumptions, stroll along the high-tide line, read or play crazy 8s with the hottest man in town and still get to bed by 10:30 and be up by 6am to surf some glass.
I become equal measure vulnerable and invincible. This way of living has been calling to me for years.
I know what you are thinking — “pshaw! that is the lifestyle that calls to everyone.” But that isn’t true.
Yes, this all sounds idealistic in writing, but living in another language, in an un-home-like place challenges everything on some level. Interacting with people who maybe don’t get you and mostly don’t get why you’re there isn’t always fun — they wonder why I am here and not making babies in my rich country. And I suppose they are kind of right to question the traveller’s motives. After all, I am here because of my rare privilege to have career and financial options, and because life here is cheap to my Canadian dollar. Yeah all humans have some degree of choice, blah blah blah, but in the places I like to travel most women have to be miraculously lucky and crazy-bold warriors to make that a possible ‘choice’.
The point of all this rambling is that I am here — in the place where I am best self.
This is the ‘one’ thing that has quietly been calling to me for years, but I seem to have a habit of paving it over when I go home. My temporary indulgence of time and space has rekindled the possibilities and, despite my rush to do all of the things, I know I need to figure out how to make something like this the new normal.
Now if I can just find me some courage…
