by Jaimal Yogis
So we too are an illusion, a mirage. And the solar system and galaxy and universe around us, all made of tiny subatomic waves, are spiraling wavelike mirages. Realizing this on an experiential level is, they say, what a Buddha sees. It’s why a Buddha can enjoy bliss and be unbothered by loss. But usually, we are so caught in the force and swirl of the illusion, we don’t have any ability to see through it—to see that it’s hollow at its core.
The magic of the tube, however, is that, well, it is already hollow at its core. And there you are, still and poised in the belly of the swirl, unified with it, but also outside its relentless karma. You are one with its force. But unmoved by its force. Seeing the emptiness of everything while enjoying the everything.
Granted, this is a heady metaphor. Maybe a stretch. But seeing the tattooed tube master reminded me how much I wanted to learn how to do what he was doing.
The last rays of light disappeared behind a thin layer of horizon fog. And just as the sky was nearly the same color as the water, a dark, smooth swell appeared on the horizon. I paddled hard, ready for my tube—or at the very least a smooth ride to the beach for sunset tacos with Siri.
I felt myself pick up speed and stood a split second earlier, trying to mimic the tattooed tube master. And I sort of did. I stood right in the pocket of the slurping sea, nailed my stance, angled right, and glided down the line.
In front of me, the tunnel began to form, crest throwing outward, hooking with waning sun in its curl. I ducked, ready. Then the sea swallowed.
Again, darkness.
8
Life goes on. No mountain peak impales the sun. If you come to a break in your path, leap across.
—Han Shan
In the days following, the waves got bigger. More unruly. And if I was getting really skilled at anything, it was removing bits of sand embedded in my scalp. But I was getting the tiniest bit better at approaching the tube. Progress was progress. And land life wasn’t too shabby.
After realizing we were sharing our beach shack with bedbugs, Siri had hunted down a Spanish-roofed villa that overlooked the waves. The place was only three hundred dollars per month, even had its own pool, and we fell into a good rhythm. We woke up early to meditate, do yoga, and work on our writing and painting. I’d then surf the late morning away while Siri took long walks up the cobblestone streets. Up where hungover gringos didn’t venture, she took photos of straw-hatted farmers drying chili peppers or women making tamales. Then she came back to paint them.
Midday was scorching hot. Not even the ocean, which hovered in the mid-eighties, was refreshing. So we’d lie under the fans until evening when the offshores returned. Siri then painted or swam in the calm bay to the north, and I’d usually surf again or write. Then we’d meet for dinner.
Life was good. And even if I wasn’t surfing like the tattooed tube master, nothing could really get me down with a hammock to lie in and salt-caked eyelashes.
Until it started to. After three weeks of living this schedule, I was noticing something. On an overall well-being scale, this was an upgrade from DC under the fluorescent lights. But it started to strike me too often that things should be better. Which was strange. If you would’ve asked me as a teenager if I could envision pure happiness, my answer would’ve gone something like living on a tropical beach in Mexico with a beautiful woman, nothing much to do except surf, be creative, meditate, and eat tacos. But the problem with trying to find contentment in external circumstances, even when the circumstances are great, is that you are still there with all those circumstances. And if you ever wonder why billionaires want more, try having just about everything you want and occasionally watch your thoughts—really observe them. Pleasure is relative.
Denmark has ranked above any other country in life satisfaction over the last thirty years, and scientists think one reason is their low expectations. “If you’re a big guy, you expect to be on the top all the time and you’re disappointed when things don’t go well,” Kaare Christensen, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark told the New York Times recently, referring to one of these big happiness studies. “But when you’re down at the bottom like us, you hang on, you don’t expect much, and once in a while you win, and that’s much better.”
I was beginning to see the wisdom of this. Every day I spent with this embarrassment of riches, and every day I did slightly better in the surf—meaning, didn’t kill myself—I was looking for slightly better riches. Expecting them. Not consciously expecting them. This expectation stuff was more unconscious, a latent prediction that life should always get better and better, bigger and bigger, as if we were all capitalist economies of our own. As if death didn’t exist.
There is a word for this in the Buddhist texts that sounds exactly like what it is. Dukkha. From Pali and Sanskrit, dukkha is often translated as suffering or stress. The fact that dukkha exists was the Buddha’s first teaching—the first Noble Truth. So people often think the first thing the Buddha said was life is suffering. Not exactly true. The Buddha said that life has many pleasures, pleasures he knew well from his life as a prince. It’s often said, in fact, that Prince Siddhartha and his wife made such passionate love in the palace, they fell off the roof and hardly noticed. And when he lived with ascetics for six years—fasting, doing yoga, practicing austerities—Siddhartha quickly attained their blissful states. The ascetics wanted Siddhartha to be their successor, but while close to death from living off seeds and roots, Siddhartha took an offering of milk from a village girl and declared that there is actually little benefit in torturing oneself.
The milk offering, as legend has it, made Siddhartha realize madhyamika, the middle way. “If the string is too tight, it will break,” Siddhartha said. “If it is too loose, it will not play.” And when he went to sit under the bodhi tree with this new perspective, eventually seeing the morning star and becoming fully awake, he didn’t then harp on what a bummer earth is. He recommended a simple, mindful life. But he also arranged marriages and helped laypeople connect to their ideal jobs. He seemed to appreciate the absolute—the side of reality in which all things are pure and equal—and the relative world with its beauty and sorrow.
So what was the Buddha saying with the first noble truth?
One of my professors in college taught us that dukkha translates literally as having a bad axle hole. The ancient Aryans who brought Sanskrit to India used a lot of horse- and cattle-driven vehicles, and dukkha basically meant an axle that didn’t fit well.
So the Buddha’s first teaching might be better translated as “Life is a bumpy ride.” And he was quite detailed on why, details we used to chant at the monastery: Jātipi dukkhā. Birth is dukkha. Jarāpi dukkhā. Ageing is dukkha. Maraṇampi dukkhaṃ. And death is dukkha. Sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha.
It’s true. We are always ageing, always not quite getting what we want, always losing a little of what we love, always associating with people and things that aren’t exactly the way we want them to be, and always surrounded by birth and death and sickness. Rather than sugarcoating life, the Buddha seemed to be saying that all the unpleasant features of life are the wily waves on the surface of the sea. And as anyone who has ever surfed knows, bumps can be jolting and painful. Or they can be the way things are—even fun.
I thought back to DC’s fourteen-hour workdays where the bumpy ride was so obvious: full frontal dukkha. Here in Mexico, with the exception of getting drilled by the waves daily, I was encountering pleasant things nearly every second. Yet the mind was still caught in constant attraction and aversion: If I was a little better surfer, writer, boyfriend, I’d be OK. If Siri was just a little less sensitive, a little more into surfing, she’d be perfect. If there weren’t quite so many damn tourists here! If I knew I was accepted to grad school, I could relax.
Siri and I were locked in this type of thinking nearly consta
ntly. Or at least I was. Fortunately, however, if you want to learn, life offers up teachers and mine would soon reveal themselves: a big-wave surfer named Eduardo and two cheerful Italian pharmacists. Oh, and Siri.
I didn’t see the tattooed tube master again. He was probably off at some secret break at the end of a long dirt road. Or maybe he was a Mayan sea god who’d just appeared for a few rides.
But there was another surfer named Eduardo whose riding I began to study. Eduardo was not as graceful as the tattooed man. But he was a deft tube rider. He had also just opened a little palapa restaurant on the water. Siri and I loved his mango smoothies. So we often ate breakfast there and got to know him.
When I first met him, I thought Eduardo was pretty cool. OK, maybe I wanted to be him. Eduardo looked like a Mexican Mark Wahlberg. He had a girlfriend who modeled in Milan. He owned this hip little smoothie shack, and just about every turn he did could’ve ended up in Surfer Magazine.
Sure, Eduardo had a bit of that too-cool-for-school attitude of people who grow up in tourist towns and never leave. But Eduardo tried to be a nice guy—even gave me a good deal on one of his old boards since my old fish was not quite doing the trick. I was impressed—stoked even.
Siri, however, was wary. And the second or third time we went to the smoothie shack, I started to see that I might not want to be exactly like Eduardo. Eduardo, we soon noticed, talked exclusively of himself, never asking a single question of his customers. And since he had surrounded his palapa with photos of himself surfing, you could kind of see the logic. Second, Eduardo’s eyes never settled. They were always darting about. It seemed Eduardo was either worried someone was after him or worried he might miss a hot girl or a great wave. And lastly, when Eduardo talked about his surfing “career”—which was a lot—there was a heaviness.
“I always think I be pro surfer,” he told us one morning as he chopped papayas with a machete. “I mean, I surf three hundred and forty days last year! Three hundred and forty days! But I guess”—he trailed off—“I don’t know—maybe not happen.”
The locals all recognized Eduardo as one of the best. Even the silver-mustached man who sold frozen bananas on the beach, donkey in tow, told us: “Eduardo es un superhero! Todos conocen Eduardo!” But during competition time, Eduardo often choked.
“Maybe there is something in me that no want to compete, you know,” Eduardo said. “But travel and surf as a pro is my dream, like from when I so small.”
Maybe because it was what we’d been trained to say, or maybe because we sensed Eduardo’s inner fragility, Siri and I encouraged him not to give up his dream. “You’re only twenty-five, man!” we said, but when we left the palapa, we started wondering if that was right.
“I don’t think I can go back,” Siri said as we strolled up the dirt road. “It’s depressing. Here he is in this beautiful place, and he’s the best surfer, and he’s handsome, and he just complains. I always leave depressed.”
So, we stopped going to Eduardo’s. Instead, we went to another smoothie shop a few blocks away. But I started running into Eduardo in the water a lot. And even when Eduardo was surfing better than everyone, when he botched a ride, he growled or smacked the water. His posture always seemed taut as though he was ready to unravel at any moment but couldn’t. I started to feel almost bad for Eduardo, the man with the dream surf life.
“Isn’t the whole point to have fun?” Siri asked one evening when we were out to dinner and saw Eduardo getting out from his sunset session. We were eating chile rellenos and drinking Pacifico, tiki torches flickering, a mariachi band singing in the background. The low sun was turning the sky velvet orange, and Siri, up until this question, had been occasionally running down to kick up sea foam and take photos of the birds.
I’d had a rare good day in the waves before dinner, a glimmer of tubular success. And though my mindful half could see Eduardo as a caricature, a lesson in the subtleties of dukkha, the teenage part that still kind of wanted to live Eduardo’s life felt defensive.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is supposed to be fun. But it’s hard to explain if you don’t surf.”
“Oh, right,” Siri said. “It’s, like, so beyond words, man.”
I chuckled, trying not to be annoyed. But I soon found myself in an unprovoked monologue about Eduardo. And about the system.
Like me, Eduardo had come of age in the ’80s and ’90s, I told Siri. Classic films like Morning of the Earth, which portrayed surfers as shamans communing with the gravity of the moon, were long gone. Surfing had now become corporate: soft drink deals, seven-figure endorsements, dads and moms who raised their two-year-olds to be world champs. And surf films, instead of symbols of a life outside the rat race, revolved around how many adrenaline-laced stunts and women in thongs could be packed into an hour. Eduardo had watched hundreds of these videos with his buddies growing up, and they’d been sold an idea of the perfect life: shred hard, go pro, get the girl, get paid to travel to exotic locations, and thou shalt not suffer. But the going-pro part happened only for a few hundred surfers. Of those, only the top ten were rich and famous. And now women were surfing just as radically as men, but the surf media, on the whole, were still portraying them like Barbie play toys.
So sure, surfing was a way of life, a religion. But that way of life had sold out. Surfing’s corporatized cult was colonizing the minds of young surfers the world over, selling them a fairy tale of happiness just so corporations could sell them seventy-dollar surf trunks. Then, rich from their brainwashing, those colonizers—I wasn’t quite sure who they were but I knew they were out there—were buying up the coastlines in Africa and South America and Indonesia, imperializing those little fishing towns—towns with beautiful cultures that date back thousands of years—and turning them into a lame reality TV show. Eduardo, I said, was a victim in that system.
I rambled on for a long time about this—feeling a bit above it all and forgetting that I was wearing my own seventy-dollar surf trunks. (I’d gotten them on sale.) By the time I was done, the sun had long since set. Siri looked as if she was out to eat with someone who wasn’t really out with her. But she played along.
“Sounds like you might feel the same way,” she said. “I mean, you’re pretty stressed if you miss a good day of surf. If you have to take the wrong board out.”
“We’re all pawns,” I said sarcastically. But my smile was tense. I suppose some part of me knew that I was ranting about myself, that I’d come to Puerto to find peace amid the ambitious modern world, but that this was also, to some extent, an attempt to never grow up. To keep seeing myself as a victim of the system.
Eager to take the spotlight off of me, I asked Siri if she felt pressure to be part of that elite urban art world that she certainly had the talent to be part of but also seemed aloof from.
“I did in college,” she said, “but I just realized I wasn’t really enjoying making art anymore so I just stopped worrying about it. If people like my paintings, they like them. If they don’t, they don’t.”
“Just like that?” I said.
“Well,” she said, “I guess at first I went through a period of obsessing about it, then hating the snooty art world and its whole black-turtleneck thing. But then I realized I was making myself miserable hating anything. Judging the elite, you sort of become what you hate. I don’t know. I guess I realized the art world is like any world, good and bad. It’s just what it is. And if you’re an artist, you make things.”
I’d have agreed if I was listening better. But the moment Siri had started talking, I started wondering whether Eduardo and I really were alike.
I realized my bad listening was making me exactly like Eduardo. Then I repeated the words Siri had just said silently so the words actually planted in my brain.
“Exactly,” I said. But, like surfing, good conversation is all timing. The response came too late.
Siri looked out at the horizon, quiet, then took a swig of beer as she shot a glance at me. I recognized the glare: t
he exact one she often gave to Eduardo.
9
In the deep blue off Diamond Head, running downwind before the howling trades, kayak all too eager to pitchpole, to broach. The waves, also wind-inspired, giving chase. A following sea.
—Thomas Farber
The next morning, I woke to the sounds of thunder rattling our windows. Or I thought it was thunder. As I rolled out of bed, I realized the thunder was the ocean. A long-period swell had filled in overnight, meaning the storm that generated these waves had churned far across the Pacific. Off Japan perhaps. Or New Zealand. I tiptoed onto the patio, trying not to wake Siri, then watched from the balcony, at first wondering where the waves I’d heard were.
They were out there. But the distance of a long-period swell can create fifteen-minute lulls between sets. And when the sets of seven or eight waves finally arrived, they were clear, defined, gorgeous, and green. They also looked like they could roll a Mack truck.
Back knotted up from too much paddling, bruised in every corner from getting pummeled and stomped, I considered walking down the beach a mile to La Punta, a less exposed left-hander where smaller waves crumbled instead of heaved—not much chance for a tube. But then, Siri and I would be leaving Puerto in a week to head back to Oaxaca City. This could be the final day of big swell—the last chance for that memorable tube that would set things right again.
I ran down the cement steps with the board Eduardo had sold me—a six-foot-ten pintail—sprinted over the cold morning sand, and dove into the foam just as the sky was turning from silver to teal. I paddled out between sets and made it without a single duck dive. But even without the waves, you could feel their electricity. Some wild power was out there. My gut twisted at the edges.
Trying to keep those twists from becoming knots, I focused on my breath—in, out, in, out—and when a wall of jade did appear on the horizon, fear was there but it didn’t take the lead. I paddled steadily. And figuring there were more waves in the set, I paddled over the first. At the crest, I could feel the swell’s unusual thickness, and the next wave looked even fatter. But when it leapt at me, menacing and jade, I turned without thinking, took a few strokes and stood. Usually I felt hurried at Puerto. But this wave seemed to pick me up like a grandfatherly giant, almost in slow motion.