I was soon at the bottom, rapidly drowning in my own mind. The storm was bringing all contexts at the same time. I couldn’t separate ground swell from wind swell. My paddle into social environment had no timing, nothing longer made sense to me. Again and again did I nosedive into this turbulent spiral of getting more and more frighten of my own context. My own thoughts were a constantly closing wave and I was afraid. There was no healthy space to enjoy. To stand up at the surface, to smile in the sun, felt like “walk on water”. So that’s what I decided to do. I bought a cheap bus, left the city of Stockholm, and learned to “walk the water”. After a few nearly drowning experiences from understanding that walking on water was harder for me than for Jesus, I bought my first surfboard.

 

I started to surf the pain away. I was traumatized from society. There had been unhealthy pressure from the company I was in charge of; there had been both physical and psychological assaults. I worked against my own moral and far from everything you can call positive stimulations.

 

As I did, many people live their life in big towns constantly wondering why there life feels meaningless. A complex question. I found some answers from the ocean while surfing.

 

Existential happiness. We are walking to stores, buying things we have no idea about how they got there, then we work all day for something we collect as money. While being exhausted from stress we try to have fun on those play yards for adult’s society created spending these money we already collected. We live so far from our own natural environment, the environment called nature. We forgot the genuine worth of forests, mountains and oceans. The fact that we have forgotten nature is also a risk for nature it self. There is something special with the knowledge of surviving a storm in a sailboat, or riding a wave in the perfect way. Ocean has become a friend, and our knowledge makes us survive. That kind of happiness has some meaning that society never can create. I started watching a plant that day. Every single minute it became more of that full brightening colorful being. In the same time I started to reflect about the wind in my hair, and the sound of the ocean. I started to live closer to natural survival and deaths, closer to things our minds is created to care about. I call it existential happiness.

 

The feeling of getting people to understand the ocean in a better way, feeling the hope flowing into there body’s while listening to the sound of the waves, reflecting about the swell, and suddenly finding pure happiness while seeing my students standing up surfing. To teach about, and together with the ocean, is a pure blessing. I just love to coach surfing!

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/Måns