Quiz: Does surfing make you happy?

Do you, mostly, smile or grimace?

Generally speaking, I get a kick out of surfing. It don’t take much.

The cliched thrill of the first duck-dive, the cold water instantly reviving my spirits more than any coffee could. The satisfaction of a wave lanced to the best of my ability, maybe an air almost ridden out of. Feeling my back foot pushed into the kick of my tail-pad in a turn. A stranger commenting favourably on a tube. Driving home in the dark with my shirt off and the sunroof down after a glassy afternoon melts into night.

It doesn’t always end like that, of course.

Often, I’ll spend a torrid forty-five minutes dodging thrown boards, being yelled at, dropped-in on, and all for a few seconds of wave time.

Sometimes it’s that performance plateau you just can’t climb over, and which we debated, recently, here. How dreary and old it becomes when you make the same mistake two thousand times over.

The whole notion that your worst surf is always better than the best day at work is more a comment on the sad reality of most of our jobs than the perfection of surfing. If you’re in a cubicle, your only friend a dried-out succulent next to your beige PC, and pecking at electronic spreadsheets like a cage-chicken at its artificial feed, I hear ya.

And, so I wonder, when you closely examine your surfing life, does it make you, mostly, happy?

In a majority of instances, do you exit the water with your spirits aloft?

Or does surfing give you the shits more often than not and you continue to surf out of habit, and maybe identity?

There’s a moment in the short film below (fifty-two seconds in) where Tanner Gudauskas says, “This is… the sickest thing ever.”

Is that a comment on perhaps a man whose interests in life are too narrow?

Or is surfing that damn good that a crummy river wave can turn you into the happiest man (or girl, of course, hello Jen See, I loved your story yesterday) alive?