A dream is often the ethereal nature of hope come to life in mental images, but for many, when the dream doesn’t come true, despair is the result.

My dad’s dream of traveling to the 1948 London Olympics and winning a swimming gold medal for his country didn’t come true.

While waiting for a wave on his wooden surfboard about one hundred yards out from shore at South Beach in Durban, South Africa, a shark came up underneath him and hit him with terrifying force, biting down into his right bicep.

He later wrote, “it lifted me clear into the air” and “it was an ideal day for surfing and for sharks.”

My father was rushed to the hospital and given blood transfusions and emergency surgery and ultimately survived. He traveled to San Francisco for additional arm surgery and recuperated on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, where he befriended the Kahanamoku clan, legendary beachboys who had been his swimming heroes.

A founding principle of the beachboy ethos is “Never turn your back on the ocean.”

Be aware of the dangers associated with the sea, but never turn your back on its goodness.

I like to think that this simple concept gave my father hope in what could have been a time of deep despair. Hope is a choice, a reframing of the present situation and a positive perspective of the future. Hope is action, the antidote to the inaction of despair.

In one bite, the shark had erased my father’s dream. Over the years, I have thought what that might mean to an athlete in his physical prime—poised to be a champion and then no hope of success. What happens when your dream is no longer attainable? Is hope vanquished, and does despair reign?

Is life a spiral downward into despair, a journey forward with a backpack laden with bitterness and hopelessness?

When I think of my father and how he lived his life, I know he constructed a new dream—a dream not of being the best swimmer but rather of helping other people be their best at what they loved.

He helped an entire generation of young surfers realize their potential through emotional and financial support, and I was part of that tribe. My dad reframed his dream into giving hope to others—making their dreams come true.

Three decades after recuperating on the beach at Waikiki, my father traveled back to Hawaii to watch me compete in the Pipeline Masters, the world’s most prestigious surfing competition on the world’s most dangerous wave.

I was relatively unknown, the youngest competitor, up against the legendary Hawaiian surfers, and competing with my back to the wave, which back then was a fundamental disadvantage. I stood on the beach with my dad after the final ended, nervously awaiting the judges’ decision.

The results came over the PA system: “In first place: Shaun Tomson.”

It was a massive upset of the established surfing hierarchy and the biggest win of my life.

I hugged my dad. Perhaps his original dream didn’t come true (that ended on a beach in Durban), but he helped his son achieve his, on another beach, halfway around the world.

The Surfer and The Sage

Legendary world champion surfer Shaun Tomson and international best-selling poet-philosopher Noah benShea join forces to offer you insight on a path of purpose, hope, and faith.

Buy on Amazon

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Anxiety is a jab in the jaw for your attention; it gets your heart beating, your senses tingling, and your body ready for action—it’s a jolt of adrenaline straight to the central nervous system.

Right above my childhood bed in my father’s apartment overlooking the Bay of Plenty in Durban, South Africa, was a photo of the Banzai Pipeline—the world’s most feared wave.

I would get anxious just looking at the picture because I knew that one day I would have to go there to test myself . . .

The waves at the Banzai Pipeline break a short distance from shore, often no more than fifty yards from the coarse sand on which sit thousands of spectators during the winter competition season. Waves are generated by storms hundreds of miles away, and these swells travel through deep water until feeling the resistance of the shallow coral reef at the Pipeline. Waves stack up together into sets, a grouping, each about fifteen seconds apart, and then increase in size as they sweep towards the shore, their force magnified by the shallowing coral reef, changing from swells into waves, whipped ever-higher by the fierce trade winds blowing the spray upwards and out to sea like a rain squall.

As you stand on the beach watching ten- to fifteen-foot waves detonate on the reef, you can feel the concussion through your feet. Ka-boom—ka-boom. Surfers paddle for the waves, sometimes blinded by the fierce winds, and launch themselves over the edge of the wave as it rears up vertically on the reef, hoping that their forward momentum, skill, and commitment will keep them on the wave’s face and not pitch them forward into the air and a deadly wipeout.

After I would paddle out through the in-rushing waves, sped along by the out-rushing rip current, I would sit and wait for my first ride and consciously suppress the beating of my heart.

Anxiety is caused by a fear of a future occurrence—failure, injury, or even death. Anxiety is a deep dread of failing.

I discovered that anxiety can be controlled, first through breath and then with clearing thoughts. Breathe slowly and deeply, calmly and consciously, and then empty the mind, clear it of all thought. Calmness is like a warming coat for a shivering body, an antidote to fear, a clearing wind to sweep away anxiety.

I would breathe, slowly and deeply, rhythmically, and the fluid motion would still my beating heart, and, through focus and concentration, through thought and control, I would let go of being anxious and find my inner calm. I would bring the fear and anxiety of an uncertain future and potential failure to my locus of control in the present. And then I would start to paddle for the next wave, and my actions and forward motion would dispel the anxiety like a clearing and calming wind . . .

The Surfer and The Sage

Legendary world champion surfer Shaun Tomson and international best-selling poet-philosopher Noah benShea join forces to offer you insight on a path of purpose, hope, and faith.

Buy on Amazon

The post ANXIOUS & CALM appeared first on Shaun Tomson | World Champion Surfer, Keynote Speaker & Author.

The new African moon is up over the water, turning the indigo swells into shimmering gold as they march forward relentlessly, ending their long journey and crashing forward on to the rocky shore.

It is late in the evening and I’m sitting at 20 Pepper Street, the most popular restaurant and surf hangout in the booming little town of Jeffreys Bay.

My muscles are exhausted from a series of 9-hour sessions at Supertubes, just about 100 yards away from where I’m sitting right now, and at the edge of my hearing I can feel the surf still thundering down the point. I’m not quite sure how much more of this my body can handle but right now it’s good to be alive today in J-Bay, thinking of today’s great surf, and what is to come tomorrow.

Back to the Bay

I haven’t been back to J-Bay for two years now. It is a time-consuming, grueling journey from my adopted home of Santa Barbara. The long point at J-Bay has always been my spiritual center and the great sessions I enjoyed starting in the late 60’s through the ‘70’s, 80’s and 90’s have been deeply etched into my heart and soul. I sat back in my chair and reflected on the common theme of why Kelly and I were here. Two different generations all coming together at the longest wall in the world. I wasn’t here to reclaim my youth or prove anything to anyone except myself. I was here because I love this wave deeply and Kelly, he could be anywhere but he was here too, renewing the special bond that he has with this special place.

The long point at J-Bay has always been my spiritual center and the great sessions I enjoyed starting in the late 60’s through the ‘70’s, 80’s and 90’s have been deeply etched into my heart and soul.

After 2 years away that first look at J-Bay is a heart-stopper; the gentle arc of coastline along the mile long point with crescents of swells chasing each other, the wave breaking perfectly, sometimes only 25 yards from shore, along dark black mussel covered rocks, bordering a shell strewn beach. You can look out over the ocean, southwards to your right, standing on a wooden walkway, balanced over indigenous aloe and fragrantly scented fynbos, up to the start of the wave at Boneyards, and with one sweep of your head take in a 10 wave set, heading north through the sections of Supertubes, Impossibles, Tubes and ultimately the Point, the last portion of the ride, a mile and three and half minutes of wave time from the start point.

If you look behind, away from the ocean, evidence of chaotic development is everywhere – a cacophony of guest houses screaming for customers and pop-up face brick houses all scrabbling for a piece of the perfect wave. But it’s easy to turn away from it all and look to the perfection coming over the horizon.

Getting low

Deep lows track up from the frigid Southern Antarctic, heading to the northeast– the icepack is like an overheated reverse furnace, chucking out molten blobs of red and magenta that roll up our internet wave modeling maps like enraged plasma – the darker and bigger the better. While Cape Town at the southern tip of Africa cops the brute power of the swell full in the face, J-Bay is 400 miles away, to the north and east, protected by distance and landmass. By the time the swells bend into the bay they are groomed by the prevailing southwesterly wind and organized into endless arcs of bending energy. The wave is one long, flat-out speed run when it’s 8 feet and ruler edged from the South, with a hard South West wind giving you the extra lift for the high line drive through each critical section.

This year an earlier massive easterly Fall swell coincided with ultra high equinox tides and resulted in extensive destruction all along the country’s east coast. Roads and beaches were washed away and entire surf spots were simply erased from existence. J-Bay wasn’t immune and huge quantities of sand were scoured out of the rocks bordering the beach and deposited 100 yards south. This makes paddling in and out, especially on solid swells on a high tide, an absolute nightmare. For me booties are a necessity especially when you get sucked between 2 mussel covered crags of rock where there used to be a sandy refuge. All the pros go bare foot and there is a keyhole going in and going out, but if you miss it, you are in for a rough, rocky ride.

This particular swell just kept coming on. Lows and cold fronts were stacked up, back to back all the way back to Antarctica. It reminded me of the ‘70’s when I would drive down from Durban and stay for weeks on end surfing swells that never seemed to stop. This time, the Northern hemisphere was stone dead and it seems that all the power had shifted south. It started out at 6ft on the Sunday after the contest and then stayed solid for 10 days maxing out at 8 feet.

Choices

J-Bay is not a wave of life and death – there is an element of risk but the challenge comes from the complexities of dealing with the speed of the wave and the length and vast expanse of the wall.

There are just so many choices to make and so many opportunities to make the wrong decision. I like to take the highline and carve the turn low and deep aiming for a point 25 yards away. I’m a natural born carver and that is what the wave is made for – no half turns or head rolls, just power on power, calves and quadriceps against a wall of unyielding pressure.  Pulling out the right board is also important – while anything works reasonably well at J-Bay I like a little extra length to carve huge arcs on the wide-open face. The top pros are riding 6’’0’ to 6’1” – I like at least a 6’6”, as sometimes the wave can get a touch flat off the bottom and the extra length helps to come hard off the bottom and drive down the line to make the wave.

It can get cold out there in the line-up. Water is in the low to mid 60’s but the wind is a knife cutting through nylon lined neoprene – throughout the swell I putting in daily six to 9 hour sessions so a 4/3mm wetsuit combination is essential.

I know life on the pro tour must at times be a grind and home is enticing but it always amazes me when the best surfers in the world walk away from insane surf and a building swell but this is exactly what happened. Taylor Knox and Jeremy Flores stayed on for the first day only and both of them laid down some super fast clean lines. Taylor’s old school power carves are perfectly suited to the long lines of Jeffery’s and watching him when it came up would have been a real treat but he bailed.

By day two, with the exception of Kelly the entire WCT contingent was gone.

I like to sit way up the point at Supers – the best and biggest ones hit a little button out there and speed along the point, doubling up through the inside. Occasionally, on a very low tide, a set will strike Boneyards perfectly, double up and run all the way through but it is a long, long wait.

Kelly in deep

And then there was Kelly. The talk was that he was checking out. A month before the event the surf media was all in a froth – I heard the reverb all the way back in California from Chile; Dingo Morrison had taken out Kelly with a maxed out effort in Arica, at the Ripcurl Search Pro, laying down a perfect 10 and Kelly was done  – 8 world Titles, 33 wins and $1.5 million in prizemoney – he had decided to check out. But he told me at J-Bay that it was all B.S. but you can sense he is wrestling with a decision. I don’t know how long Kelly is going to go on – I don’t think even he knows. But it looks like he’ll go until the stoke runs out and after seeing him surf at J-Bay it looks like it’s going to keep running for a while.

He has a special connection with J-Bay, unlike anyone I have ever seen. There is some deeper relationship there, hidden beneath the surfing you see on the surface. He has an intuition about him, a connectedness to the environment, an enlightenment; a rare understanding of how he fits into the natural order of life and it shines through him brightly.

He told me about dolphins guiding him to where he needed to be: –

“The first day I was ever here I saw dolphins, I saw a shark, whales, flamingos, all within just a few minutes of being here.  So that really struck me.  It just seemed like a place that was so alive.  So much happening, so much going on with the wildlife and then, when you go out, you’re just a part of that.  I mean the closest I’ve ever been to whales has been here.  There’ve been a lot of waves with dolphins too.  In fact, in that final I had with Andy the other year in 2005 when I won, before my last wave, there were dolphins going back out.  And I was so tired; I was so out of my mind, with just about two minutes left in the final.  I was so tired, and I’d almost given up, just because physically I didn’t have much strength left, and I said, “Well, I’ll just follow these dolphins.”  And I paddled right behind the dolphins all the way back out.  And it was something pretty magical and it was the last thought I had before I got that wave (that won it for me with 32 seconds left.)

That’s when you wonder what that deeper connection is to nature and stuff, because I literally just said “I’ll just follow these dolphins.”  I was thinking in my head, “they’ll take me to the right place.”

At 35, Kelly still looks to be in his prime, redefining what is possible in sport. On the long walls of Jeffery’s his surfing is very radical and progressive, based around swooping turns off the bottom and very tight and late arcs off the top – many times I’d expect him to run out his turn around the falling lip and he would hit it full on, busting the tail free in a controlled power drive, reacting with lightning quick reflexes. He maintains a low center of gravity, crouches low through the turn and then gets the spring and projection as the concave releases from the downward pressure.

It seems there is a trend on the tour to much more upright surfing, a more stiffened lower back but Kelly is all rubber-like flexibility. There are a few simple words that define the essence of great surfing – manoeuvres and techniques have evolved over the last 30 years but the essential dna helix of what constitutes truly great surfing is unchanged – speed, power, rhythm, aggression, style and imagination. Kelly has all this and he has that little extra chromosome of intuition, a knowingness, a prescient reactivity to the ebb and flow of the ocean.

His wave selection is uncanny and he would select many waves that others would pass up only to have the waves double up through the Impossibles section, the fastest, hollowest portion of the ride. He came smoking on down the line towards me on one as I paddled back out, turning forward for maximum speed, the lip inches from his head, running for the light on his concave, the foam ball roiling beneath his feet. He looked calm and unhurried, at the very center of his universe, right where he wanted to be. He smiled, and I smiled back.

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 JP was on a motor bike when a driver jumped a stop street and smashed into him – he was left for dead and lost his leg.

Dries was a powerhouse of muscle, one of South Africa’s most promising rugby players when a truck driver lost control and pushed his car into a ravine – he broke his spine and is paralyzed from the waist down.

Gallo from Spain is totally blind in both eyes, gets called into waves by a friend, and surfs by feeling the energy of the wave he is riding.

Chris had his leg torn off by a tiger shark in Hawaii, and Bruno is paralyzed below his waist – he eventually won the unassisted prone surfing division and is now World Champion. In his previous life he was a boat captain taking surfers on exotic trips around the islands of Sumatra. He lived an idyllic life, based in a tree house on the tranquil island of Bali. He came back to his homeland of South Africa and en route to the airport was attacked by four men in another car, waving guns, shouting at him to pull over. When he wouldn’t stop they filled the car with bullets, and he rolled the car trying to escape. After the crash the gangsters returned and while trying to drag him out of the car to rob him, the car toppled over and broke his back. He was left for dead and discovered a few hours later.

Watching all these men surf was a truly inspiring experience.  They had travelled from across the world to challenge themselves, to push against their own limits, riding and being liberated by the ocean’s energy. What impacted me deeply was their optimism, their exuberance, their love for life and the fact that each of them had made the choice to have a positive life by having a positive attitude. They had adapted their attitude to their circumstances.

In his best selling book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” holocaust survivor and pioneering psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote of attitude in relation to his experiences in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Each and every one of us has lived through times of heartbreak and despair, and I have come to a hard understanding of certain truths:

We all live in a challenging sea, and our attitude towards those challenges defines who we are, and how we live our lives. Our attitude is our fundamental choice in life – positive or negative, hopeful or despairing, positive or optimistic. We have limited control over our circumstances, however we have absolute control over our attitude.

• Our attitude about the present defines our future.
• Our attitude about the future defines the present.
• Our attitude defines how we see the world and how the world sees us.
• Our attitude is the power that propels us on a journey from where we are, to where we want to be.
• Our attitude is the light that can show us the way out darkness.

It is a fundamental choice for all of us.

• Good or bad?
• Positive or negative?
• Optimistic or pessimistic?
• Hopeful or despairing?

It is a simple choice.

It is a fundamental choice to be made by everyone on this planet and this choice can change us and change our lives and change the world all around us.

There is a lot of goodness in this world and we all we all have this light inside of us.

And this light shines through to the world and people around us, in our attitude.

It is up to each and every one of us whether we wish to shine this light on the road ahead and illuminate the way forward, towards a better future, for all.

I’d like us all to consider the simple question – What is your attitude?

It is an answer, a choice without any shades of grey, without nuance, without complexity.

Positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic.

Do I choose to build my attitude and the attitude of those around me with the light of hope or the darkness of despair?

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