On purpose, envy and the ongoing miracle of John John Florence

When I see John John Florence I see a man frighteningly in control. And it makes me wonder how he's managed it, especially so young.

Often I feel life is too complicated. In moments of essential simplicity: survival, hunger, ecstasy, endurance or lust, life seems brighter, somehow.

These are the moments that might bookmark a life, memories like rootless flowers.

Once, surfing gave me simplicity. A clear goal, even if it shifted with the weather. But it was the force that propelled all else.

I’ve lost that now, moved on. Found it in other things. I doubt it’s gone forever. I’ve been missing it lately.

And I don’t know if it’s the act itself, or just the dedication to it. Because for me, life is mostly one long series of obsessions followed by abandonment.

I never realised it before. Not until my son was diagnosed with autism, and it made me revisit my own past through a different lens.

But I don’t want to get into that here. Partly because I’ve been writing about it in private, and for now I want it to remain that way. And partly because I think denial, or at least obliviousness, in the face of challenges like this is often a solution.

Fucking suck it up. Everyone’s got problems. Mine are lesser than most. I don’t need any more scapegoats or excuses.

But I do know that I’ve always lacked purpose. I’ve lived a life feeling elevated, somehow, yet unable to focus the burning energy I keep in reserve to set fire to the one thing I love. That’s not to say an unhappy life, just one at the threshold of some unidentified goal, never quite fully committed.

So when I see men like John John Florence, Jack Robinson, Griffin Colapinto, I see men who seem curiously, and, honestly, quite frighteningly in control. And it makes me wonder how they’ve managed it, especially so young.

“Just having fun out there” has become a trite statement in pro surfing. It’s easy to pay lip service to this sort of attitude, and I understand it can be disingenuous at times. But when I watch the likes of Florence at his best, I can believe in it. In performances like we’ve seen at Teahupoo and Punta Roca, there is little sense of the stress of competition or challenge, there is only joy.

In post-heat interviews, albeit only in the aftermath of success, there is no hint of gloom. And it’s easy to envy their talent, and the charmed life of a professional surfer.

But I am not envious of this, I am simply envious of the control John John Florence and others like him seem to have exerted over their lives.

Clearly, I don’t really know them. We only see their public persona. But still I wonder if it’s real. And I think about how thinly stretched life can be, and I’m stuck with awe in the face of those who seem to carry clear purpose and intent.

Because you realise, at some point in life, or perhaps in many, that you are not satisfied. Not full of the life you promised yourself when you stared hard into the mirror at four am and saw someone you knew you must run from.

And even when you have crawled from the past, shedding your old self like a skin, it remains, discarded, but still in the shape of you. A wraithlike thing that lies in the corners of rooms, or draped on the bed, or cast in the grass when you are pushed up against a wall. Forever a reminder of the shape of what once was, begging you to crawl back inside.

Some days you yearn for that shimmering idol, in all his chaotic, unhinged ecstasy.

Because it might not have felt like a life, but at least it felt alive.

Days when your shoulders were loose with the swerves of doorways and tenement corners. You lay, late into the day, until the light had dissipated sufficiently to emerge again into the cigarette lit night.

You were like the foxes that momentarily partitioned the lit gaps of alleyways, then held your gaze, defiant, yet always on the cusp of fleeing. You saw kinship in them, these night-shifters, nonchalant raiders of dusk and dust.

And every day you would emerge from the night as a stranger, just as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water.

But you couldn’t stay this way forever.

Your body couldn’t take it. Your mind less so.

One way or another, everything that flares dies.

Still. Today, in moments that might be soundless or still, you catch a glimpse of this charred effigy, and you realise how much you miss his smile, and the callous beauty of living heart to mouth, to heart to mouth.

Does John John Florence suffer this sort of angst? Or is uber talent and unwavering dedication to one thing enough? That’s my question, eternally. And I wonder if this will be the same for him in years to come. Perhaps it will be more intense, given the heights he’s reached.

Is it true that everyone feels they can only grasp at the edges of a life?

Or are some people simply content?

I still don’t know the answer to that.

All I know is that I return home each day more distant, more removed from the world I’ve built.

Because I know he’s in there still, hunkered in a tenement close, plunging down cobbled streets, or standing at the shore before the sun he will not see has risen, calling into the blistering dark.