A Lesson in Life?

We've been working all day and night including weekends moving eight years of 'stuff' from our old premises to our new ones over the last 4 days.

This is the first chance I've had to put finger to keyboard. What is it about moving that brings up so much emotion? We seem to have been through the wringer and everything that could go wrong has, especially in the telephone/internet connection department. In the middle of it our son Neil broke his heel skylarking, and we had to make a mercy dash to Brisbane to bring him home. Neil is our IT guru and even though he was severely immobilized, he managed to get our broadband hooked up with amazing ingenuity. (that's another story)

Anyway, as I sat down to breakfast this morning, most unwilling to face another day of niggling nitbits, I had a very strong memory come flooding in.

I was eighteen years of age, and I was entered in my first surfing contest. Not just a contest; this was the Bells Beach International and the surf was the biggest in years, with twenty foot grinders chewing up and spitting out surfers with menacing regularity. Bells is one of the 'thickest' waves around, so when you go down on a Bells cruncher, you stay down. Your lungs are bursting and you hang on, hoping that you are going to surface. In those days we also had no legropes, so if your board didn't whack you, it was gone, and you faced a long swim in a huge rip.

Now I need to tell you that I was no champion. I was a skinny kid who liked taking risks, and this was the BIG one. Thousands of spectators lined the cliffs looking down as the waves thundered in, and as I entered the water, stroking hard to get out of the shorebreak, all I could hear was these sledgehammer waves roaring towards me. It was the most intense experience I had ever had. The waves cracked like a huge hand on a face as their peaks hit the water in front of them, forming a huge green, moving unstoppable cave; the dream of every surfer.

Even the 'hot' favourites had been wiped out; boards were broken in half, and the cameras on the cliffs were recording what turned out to be a historic moment in surfing.

Well, I got a wave. It was BIG. As I free fell down the face my board parted company with my feet, than I fell back onto it, still standing, as it hit the bottom of the wave. I turned and began to 'fly' across the wave face away from the meat grinder roaring behind me, but to no avail; this one wanted me. Suddenly I was in the tube, and everything went strangely green and quiet, then I was whacked in the head by a ten foot thick curl of solid Southern ocean.

That was my heat. The rest of my 30 minute allotted time was spent swimming back to the beach, but it didn't matter. I had surfed with the men; I had overcome my fear. I had succeeded because I survived.

Sitting over breakfast I wondered why that memory had flooded back so strongly at this moment.

I saw on the news that 'Black Monday' had sent a record wave of fear across the world stock markets. Millions of ordinary folk would be panicking... and at that moment I understood that all acts we do are to overcome fear; even the most mundane.

It seems to me that all actions are just vehicles for us to explore our true selves, to find out more about what we really are, and most certainly not what they appear to be. What they are is determined by what we make them! Faced with the mundane life, my 43 year old memory flooded in to remind me that no matter what I am doing - even writing at this desk in this moment - is no less filled with the potential for peak experience of love vs. fear. it's up to me to make what I want of it.

I have no idea whether this will asist anyone reading it; I hope so.