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...but when it does.

It feels like the universe is spoiling you. Maybe the water is a little warmer and the crowd is a little thinner. You're surfing in good company or alone. At a standby spot thats choosing to go off or you stumble on waves you wouldn't normally think to check. And you have all the time in the world. Feeling fit. Right board, right tide. You've found the peak and the waves come to you even though you're not really trying. You're timing is perfect and you make no mistakes. You're surfing just beyond your norm. And it goes on for a few hours. Two hours in you have to pinch yourself. Three hours in you're exhausted but have to milk it for a few more. Finally you get out of shear exhaustion. You sit on the beach, bluff, rocks wherever the f*ck you are, crack a tin and wonder what the hell you did to deserve that session.

Doesn't happen often.

But if its going to happen. Its probably Sept-December. Hold in there bros.

Side note, I had a mystical skate sesh today. Really wasn't motivated but forced myself to go. Park was mostly empty and it was hot. I was skating a board, I really don't like. I'm only riding it b/c I want to kill it before setting up a freshie. Anyway, some weird sh*t went down, whereby I couldn't f@#K up. I was half-arsing tricks and not really wanting them but still landing them. I've only ever done 3 backside 360 no-complies in 30+ years of skateboarding and today I landed one first try. Decided to not get too excited and hold the moment for a little. Even got stuck in traffic and then behind a train on the way home but kept my cool.

Sorry to sound like a f*cking hippy but I've got to thank the universe for the gifts of surfing and skateboarding today... without them modern life would f*cking cripple me.

Sounds like sometimes, we just try too hard or want it too bad. Maybe life isnt really so tough if we let it just come to us.
Anyway, super stoked on the surf sesh and skate sesh story, great motivation to get out even when it really is too damn hot and all you have is an ol shitey board, you might just surprise yourself.

Zzz

Howly FLOW!!

https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow

OG Burnside head Kent Dahlgren turned me onto the 'Theory of Flow' by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi when I interviewed him about skatepark design years ago for the now defunct Bail Magazine. Good shite. In a nut shell these 6 factors are needed to experience flow:


"Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
Merging of action and awareness
A loss of reflective self-consciousness
A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
A distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience"

Tex wrote:Howly FLOW!!

More like "Hardly Flow" zzz

Hakim Bey? Yes, I'm familiar with TAZ.

Never thought I'd be discussing FLOW and TAZ on the OSP. We're moving on up....

What next? Anarcho-Primitivism?

Speaking of which the likes of John Zerzan would posit that surfing and skateboarding and even art and music are reactions to the pathology of civilization. That if we lived in our more natural state, our desires would be satisfied by more direct experiences with life and nature. All day, every day would be a TAZ and we would be in permanent FLOW- if we never settled, and domesticated ourselves....

Zzz

I tend to agree. And actually I think there is evidence of pre-agriculture surfing....

As I understand it, music and art and language really came about post-agriculture and were steps away from direct lived experience and steps more towards the symbolic. The argument is pre-agriculture/ Civilization, life was art so there was no need for symbolic art.

Skateboarding for sure- grind that shite down back to dust- free us all from the constraints of symbolic thought, time, technology- instead of smithgrinds we'll pick blueberries and chase buffalo.

Zzz

Zzz