Writing and The Sea

No matter where I am, there are 2 constants. Writing and the sea. I feel uncomfortable inland and away from the coast. Or when I’m not writing.

A month before I turned 18, I left Maui and pro windsurfing for 4 years and never really came back. While I studied Literature at Princeton, my heart anchored in New York.

Before, when I left Maui, often for months at a time to compete on the world tour, I had the feeling that I was away and would return home to Hawaii. I’m not sure where home is now.

I’m homeless.

Since graduating from Princeton in 2011, I’m based on Maui, but I’m also back to Manhattan constantly. So many of my classmates have wound up in the city that I run into friends walking down the street or in random cafes getting a morning coffee. That happens on Maui too. But you expect it on an island in the middle of the ocean.

I write and i windsurf because i feel a need to. Sometimes both are miserable. But i still need to do them. Like breathing. Sometimes your nose is stuffed and you’re sick and you wish you just didn’t have to breath so that you could sleep but you have to breath. That’s what writing and windsurfing are for me.

I guess writing and the sea have become a sort of home for me. I’ve spent over 1 year– over 8765 hours– of my life at sea. Virgins to the sea can’t read the wind in the whitecaps. I suppose it’s like that more and more. So the sailor’s who’ve circumnavigated the globe see things in the sea that are invisible even to me.

The sea is an ever changing chaos. Riding waves, especially massive waves, is a meditation on reacting unconsciously. If you think, you’re too slow and will get beat down. Writing, surprisingly is the same. The blank page stares back at the pen. Challenging it. Think about it too much: writers block.

The wave and the page offer infinite possibility and potential.

These two massive chaotic sources of unknowns have become a sort of home where I can be myself, whoever that is.

I don’t know if writing and windsurfing have any grand meaning or add an value to the world. But they are my home for now, the only home I’ve got. It’s what I do.