I have found myself thinking about surfing in the last week. Don’t get me wrong: I have not been longing to surf. I did try once many years ago at surf school in Galicia with a group of friends. The holiday was fun but I took way more pleasure in eating grilled fish and drinking white wine, than I did in attempting to surf. I was more skilled at it too. I decided to put my surfing ineptitude down to being tall and having an insufficiently low centre of gravity. That was my story and I stuck to it.
So no, I have not been wishing myself on a sun-kissed surfboard. I have more been comparing my pathway through the last few months to that of a surfer. For, let’s be clear, there have been waves. In fact there have been many. Some of them have been enormous, towering, thunderously crashing waves that have threatened to drown me. Some have been more manageable Mediterranean type waves and some even quite enjoyable where the size has been just right to enable me to get a bit better at riding them and growing through them. There have also been long stretches of dead water with not a wave in sight. Just interminable weeks of working from home, staring into a computer screen and doing laps of the nearby green space, wishing for some kind of a wave or sign of life to lift and energise me, never knowing when the next will come, what size it will be and whether I will be able to ride it. I am not sure which bit I have enjoyed less: the gasping for air as I am thrown under by a tsunami-like sea monster, or bobbing about for what feels like eternity, bored and cold, waiting for a chance to live again (patience has never been my strong point).
There is just one thing I have realised with increasing certainty: there is just no knowing and no controlling. The ocean of this pandemic is too vast and its currents, tides and swells too unpredictable and wild. The only choice I have had is to surrender to it and respond as best I can as each ebb and flow, each rise and fall have come. In this way, perhaps these times have been an important lesson for me.
Three weeks ago the latest wave hit in the form of me being given notice on the flat that has been my home and sanctuary for the last two years. I have loved living here, in a little community in south Edinburgh where the local shopkeepers know me and I them, where I have felt safe and held by the walls of my beautiful fourth floor residence from which I have looked out to the hills from the kitchen and over the rooftops from the lounge, and in which I have spent the most extraordinary amount of time!! When I received the call to say I was being given three months’ notice, I was shocked and upset. But it didn’t take long before I realised that the time had come to move on again. I had for a few months been feeling the pull back to London where most of my community remains and where the energy, diversity and expanse of the city never fail to inspire and lift. Here the Universe was telling me “Go on, then!” So I picked myself up and went out and found a new home. Three days later the deed was done and I was booking a removals van. I move in two weeks’ time.
When I reflect on the last few weeks, I realise that I am a better surfer than I had appreciated. I have no doubt that I will continue to wrestle with the waves. They are still coming; ripples of anxiety, small waves of fear, Atlantic waves of excitement. I know that I will fall off the board again. I know that I will struggle sometimes to get back on. But I also know that I will get back on — even if I never quite master that jump to stand move. I put it down to my height.