Lost Innocence: The Moving Threshold

By Alex Day

A surfer living with a threshold of satisfaction stands at the edge of defeat. Because often, our surf experiences don't merely teach us what is possible; they teach us what is no longer enough.

Among everything a wave gives us, perhaps the most dangerous gift is satisfaction. Knowledge is irreversible: you cannot unknow a perfect wave, once you have surfed or seen one, every future wave is judged against it.

Satisfaction, in this sense, is beautiful, fragile — and a slightly tragic idea when coupled with the human mind.

Experience shows us that life does to us, more than what we do to it; swell lines do more to us, than we do to them. Our lines carved on the face of opal eyes erase themselves just as quickly as they were drawn. We carve, and the wave crumbles; we tuck in, and the wave collapses.

Yet, the swell lines marked on the surfer's mind are irreversible. The wave may dissolve into the place it was created, but the perception it gave the rider's eyes remains eternally accessible.

This imprint creates a threshold of comparison: the joy of meeting whatever the ocean offers is replaced by a quiet demand that tomorrow must be better than today. We must be careful. Careful not to cross the line into adapting to dopamine's call for more. Without noticing, we can begin to love conditions more than the ocean itself.

The tragedy is not that the waves become worse. It is that our threshold quietly rises. The ten-foot perfect day becomes normal. Then only the twelve-foot excites us — then Indonesia, then barrels, and then…nothing. Today becomes the hallmark for tomorrow, and possibility becomes the expectation of today.

This threshold, in the mind of a surfer loving the conditions they are given, is as persuasive as an umbrella is against the rain. The umbrella puts us at a disadvantage when dancing in the rain, and the threshold creates a barrier to seeing every wave as worthy of the last, of the possible, of the unseen, or of the unknown.

Could innocence be the remedy for such a tragedy? Innocence is an unseen wave. Untainted by human judgment or the lexicons of good and bad, surfable or un-surfable, hellish or heavenly-made. Because the moment we classify — good, bad, average, worth it, not worth it — we stop seeing. Language itself becomes a filter.

Innocence is untameable: accepting of whatever it frequents, unruly to constructs and known things, and maybe only known absolutely, to the beginner.

The beginner experiences, while the experienced surfer evaluates. They do not know the final destination; they know the completeness in starting, and where they are, and because of this, every wave is an invitation rather than an evaluation. Perfection does not exist because it has not yet been invented. They surf without a catalogue of "better sessions" and meet only the wave beneath them.

Then, does progress increase our knowledge while decreasing our joy?

Beginners may be our best teachers, as their innocence is not ignorance, but a freedom from comparison, as they live unburdened by the maturing of experiences.

Are they the untainted messengers of the ocean, teaching us how to let go and not hold on to what we think about the ocean? Reminding us, the more surfing takes away from us, the more we gain. More does not mean more satisfied, and less does not mean less satisfied.

Innocence is an empty space in the mind's catalogues of experience: it is something we lose and is hard to gain.

We cannot stop accumulating memory stores of waves, of satisfaction, of conversations and sessions. But we can meet each wave without needing it to compete with the last. We can not resist the wave beneath us, losing value to the imaginary wave within us.