Cape Leeuwin

The next day I headed for Cape Leeuwin, with it’s beautiful white lighthouse. Here I was, after 4000 kilometers down the Australian West Coast, at ‘the end of the world’, once again. I walked over to the water where the Indian and Pacific Oceans met. This was the third time I was ‘at the end of the world’. Ushuaia – Argentina in 2008, Cape town – South Africa in 2010 and now South Western Australia. How many more places did I want to visit? I turned around and looked up towards a gigantic white lighthouse my ancestors left behind, and I thought about all the sailors that crossed these oceans over the centuries. Cape Leeuwin they called this place, Dutch for Cape Lioness. A little piece of home, all the way on the other side of the world. I stood there for a moment watching the oceans. I wondered what it was I was looking for. Or, was this wandering the earth just a purpose in itself? My ancestors had been globetrotters, and therefore maybe I was too.

Lighthouse

“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life”.

― Katherine Anne Porter

The idea of ‘Surfing Life’

In 2014, my brother and I went on vacation to Morocco. One afternoon, I was watching him and his buddies ride the waves from the beach. He could just sit there in the ocean for hours, tons of waves rolled in, but only once in a while he decided to catch one. He patiently waited for the right timing, started paddling, let this one go, caught another one and fell off. A few minutes later he tried again, managed to stay on, rode one all the way to shore and came out to catch his breath.

Watching him surf made me realize that in surfing not every wave is for you, catching the right wave requires patience, and you won’t know if it is the right one until you catch it. Maybe you will fall off, and have to start all over again, or maybe it will be the ride you will remember for a lifetime.

What if you can learn how to ‘surf life’, I wondered. Finding your right frequency so to speak. Everything you do, every choice you make, every experience, can be like riding a wave. What if you can master surfing life like riding a set of waves?