Surfing

A man of acute intellect and deep compassion once said:

"Every work of art or science, however large or small, consists in catching the wave just right, and following it all the way down the line, for as long as possible, riding the crest, surfing, until we come to the inevitable final fall. If inspiration is in short supply, we fall straight away, or don't even get moving in the first place; but a masterpiece travels fast, moving but immobile, in a long horizontal plane, just slightly off-balance, on invisible lines of force that are etched imperceptibly on the wall of water.

"One might say that it is the act of creation that invents them but true discoverers see the little wrinkles written on the liquid - in the brief moments before they disappear - and then spend all their life forces and their efforts in tuning-in their eye, their bodies and the pitch of their surf-boards in pursuit of this poised equilibrium that will carry them speeding ahead, surfing, on a line that will end only in death." Michel Serres Angels: A Modern Myth

Riding a skateboard can be like that, so can skiing or snowboarding or racing a mountain bike down a hill. I remember playing basketball in some pretty tough games in college and feeling moments when everything felt like music. It is like a breath, so fragile, but once you've felt it, you keep searching for it. Sometimes when I swing my golf club it feels like one smooth rush of color. The sensation of motion, the ring of the club and the beautiful smooth flight of the ball feel like an ephemeral masterpiece that I can neither capture nor possess.

Any of our motions where failure is immanent can strike an aching chord of beauty. We cannot know the power of a poetic three-point shot unless we have the canvas of a thousand missed and mangled shots as a background. There is power in rationality and its application has saved us from many blind alleys. But the power of the poetic is of another sort. I respect rationality, need it, but it is the poetic that I crave. I respect and need the engineer that designed and built my titanium driver, but I crave the artistic stroke when for an instant I do not know club or ball or grass, only the joy of a timeless moment.