Surfing lessons from a four year old

Little kids never cease to amaze me. The lessons they teach are the most valuable around. I had one of the best afternoons I can remember over the weekend watching about the most precocious 4 year old I’ve ever met using her surf board. Given she is fair skinned and lives in Alaska trust me when I tell you that she was lathered up in more sun block than greased up deaf guy from the Family Guy. This made it especially difficult for her to try and stand up on her surfboard at the beach.  After she waded in, the combination of water and a generous application of SPF block out the sun, had essentially transformed her in to greased lightning. It was like trying to surf on a stick of butter. Time and again she would try to stand up and slip right off the board. Undaunted she kept climbing back up. She tackled the challenge with alacrity and a smile, a smile so intoxicating that I’ve ever only seen one like it on one other person in my life. She would get up / stand up on the board for a moment , but in that moment, time stood still. The look of accomplishment on her face and pure joy is something incomparable in the human experience. Inevitably she’d slip off the board in spectacular fashion. She fell into the ocean in positions that even trying to describe them I think I will throw out my back. Feet bouncing over her head. Hands passing between her legs, butt then crashing down with her feet still on the board until she flipped over backwards into the water. Each and every time she came up from under the water laughing, and not just laughing, laughing harder with every subsequent fall.

There really is nothing better for your soul than a child’s laugh. It’s more contagious than measles running through a kinder care of anti vaxxers. I was laughing harder than I can tell you. It was impossible to tell who was having more fun, but beyond the curative powers of the belly laughs, there were other lessons to be learned:
-Get up every time you fall down.
-The odds may seem stacked against you (in this case the stacked odds manifested themselves as excessive sun block and a slippery surf board, innocuous enough and well intentioned, but obstacles nonetheless )and you can use the obstacles as excuses or as motivation to work harder. Very often we run into walls in life; professionally or personally. We should never forget the walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people. This is true on so many levels.
-Spend less time “connected”. Except to use my camera I don’t recall using my phone very much at all. There is nothing in your email, or on FaceBook, instagram, or anywhere in the abyss of the internet as important or as beautiful as what’s right in front of you. (except maybe a random selfie someone snuck on your phone when you weren’t looking, and it’s more enjoyable when you find those later anyway).