The Sea Didn’t Get Calmer

Today the sea was rough, and I took the jet ski out anyway.

There was a time when that sentence would have ended differently. When the water got like this — short, nervous waves with hard shoulders — I used to fight it. I’d cut straight into the chop, head-on, and the sea would answer. Two hits out of every three waves. Bang, bang, bang. My spine took it, my wrists took it, and I’d come back to shore feeling like I’d been in an argument I lost.

Today something else happened, and I didn’t plan it. My body was steering before my mind had an opinion. I was reading the water ahead — the pockets between the waves, the soft doorways that open for half a second in the rough — and I was placing the ski into them without thinking about placing it. I got hit maybe one time in six. The rest of the ride was almost quiet, even though the sea wasn’t.

Halfway through, sitting behind a swell, the insight landed the way they always land — simple, obvious, and three years late: the sea didn’t get calmer. I got better at reading it.

Nobody gave me that. There was no course for it. It was built one rough day at a time, from every ride where I came back bruised, every wave I took wrong, every time I misjudged a shoulder and paid for it in my back. All those bad days were not failures. They were the tuition. My body was taking notes even when my mind was only counting the hits.

And I can’t pretend this is only about the water.

I have had seasons of my life that were exactly that early kind of riding. Rough water, and me cutting straight into it, head-on, proud of facing it and getting hit two times out of three. The fallouts, the endings, the nights when the program of my life never landed on earth. At the time, every one of those hits felt like proof that something was wrong with me — that other people had calmer seas.

They didn’t have calmer seas. Some of them just never went out.

Because here is the part I didn’t understand when I was younger: the fear of big waves doesn’t leave because you become braver. It leaves because you’ve been through them. You’ve worked through the ones that hit you, you didn’t stay on the shore afterwards, and somewhere in that repetition the fear quietly turned into reading. Now a big wave isn’t a threat. It’s information. Where’s the shoulder. Where’s the pocket. Where’s the half-second door.

I notice I don’t brace anymore. Bracing was my whole personality for years — in the water and out of it. Waiting for the hit, tensing before it came, calling that preparation. Reading is different. Reading is loose. Reading trusts that when the wave arrives, the body that has been through a hundred waves will know what to do with this one.

So this is what the sea gave me today, and I’m writing it down before the feeling dries with the salt: embrace the hard times. Not because of some poster on a wall — because they are literally the training. Every rough season is teaching your hands something your mind can’t learn from calm water. And the waves will get bigger; that’s not pessimism, that’s the sea. But you’ll be a different rider by the time they come.

One hit in six, and even that one didn’t scare me.

The water was rough today. I had a beautiful ride.