Occasionally, during those rare sessions where I have a little piece of the ocean to myself, I’ll sometimes close my eyes for a few moments and contemplate an idea. I know it’s a bit woo, but bear with me.
There’s something that feels ancient about the sea. Not just old—ancient. Older than pyramids, older than human language, even older than mammals as we know them.
When I paddle out, I’m drifting into something larger than anything else on Earth. Around me, the water feels alive—fluid and static. Silent and boisterous. Calm and angry. As I wait for a wave, I think: this water has been here forever.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The mind boggling number of water molecules flowing under your surfboard have traveled continents. They’ve evaporated from Amazonian rainforests, drifted through the lungs of ancient kings and heroes, been wrung out of stormclouds over Mesopotamia and fell again over Polynesian canoes.
Water is part of a closed system on Earth. What we have is what we’ve always had—roughly 1.4 billion cubic kilometers, cycling endlessly through evaporation, condensation, and precipitation [1]. Water molecules are staggeringly resilient. They’re not destroyed when digested or excreted. They just move on. Through soil. Through rivers. Through life.
That means the water in your morning, pre-surf coffee might once have flowed in the Rubicon as Caesar crossed—or laid upon Christ’s brow during the Sermon on the Mount.
The average water molecule has a “residence time” of about 9 days in the atmosphere, 17 days in rivers, and up to thousands of years in deep groundwater or ice [2]. This means many molecules in our bodies—and in our oceans—have passed through countless biological and geological chapters before arriving here.
So when you’re paddling into the sea, in a way, you’re entering the most ancient library on Earth. And unlike stone tablets or buried bones, this library doesn’t sit still. It moves. It remembers. It breathes.
Participating in the Journey
But surfing adds another layer. It’s not just immersion, it’s participation.
Far out in the open ocean, a storm brews, unseen by any human eye. There, over days, the violent friction between wind and surface stirs up energy. This energy eventually compresses into long, smooth swells—rolling hills in the sea that travel for thousands of miles. These aren’t random ripples—they’re coherent, organized pockets of energy that pass through water molecules, but don’t carry them. Like a message in Morse code, the swell transmits force [3].
Then, when that swell reaches your local, it begins to slow, lift, and finally break. That moment, when energy becomes form, is a kind of birth. A kind of release. Surfers wait for that tipping point, where potential becomes motion. When you catch it, you’re not just riding water. You’re riding thousands of miles of momentum, energy gathered during an incredible weeks-long journey, focused into a fleeting, glittering edge of motion.
To me, this is why surfing feels sacred. This is why I feel whole in water. On a wave, you’re feeling the pulse of the Earth’s life force.
To surf is to participate in the culmination of the sea’s voyages. To listen to the echoes of ancient molecules and storms that passed before memory began. It’s not just sport—it’s ceremony. It’s communion.
The wave pulls you. Like McConaughey said, you’re in line and on time.
And for a few seconds, you’re not just in the world—you’re with it. In rhythm. In memory. In motion.
And the ancient library turns another page.
Sources
- Gleick, Peter. The World’s Water Volume 8: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. Island Press, 2014. ↩
- United States Geological Survey (USGS). “Residence Time of Water.” USGS Water Science School. https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school ↩
- Kinsman, Blair. Wind Waves: Their Generation and Propagation on the Ocean Surface. Dover Publications, 1984. ↩
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