You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to … raft?
Fire ants and surfing. Before today, I never would have thought I’d be writing about these two things in the same post. But, here we are. In a world full of adversity and crisis, fire ants and surfing have much to teach us about how we might respond to these incredibly uncertain and stressful times. I could write about each one in separate posts, but I’ve found power in pairing them together because the contrast can teach us about the promises and perils of going it alone and banding together for our individual and collective survival.
First, surfing. I use Insight Timer almost every day for my morning meditation. After a recent update, opening the app brings up a white screen with an inspiring quote such as Jon Kabat Zinn’s, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” That one gets me every time.
Before I tell you about the ocean of my childhood, I want to say that I have a conflicted relationship with our culture’s pervasive messages about mindfulness and meditation as a cure-all for a variety of life challenges. Personally, I enjoy my daily meditation. Mindfulness and meditation techniques help me settle, listen to my soul, and connect with the energy of the world. Collectively, I see mindfulness used as a way to ignore and individualize structural problems. For example, I can meditate to center myself and lower anxiety about my current situation, but if my boss continually requires me to do more in my job with fewer resources to do the work, then the root of the problem lies in the structure of the job. Mindfulness can help me calm my nervous system, but it won’t change the exploitative roots of capitalist workplaces.
Now to the waves. I grew up on the beaches in Florida where swimming in the ocean brought feelings of peace, joy, and excitement. I never learned to surf on a board, but I spent most weekends flying over and under and with the waves. As a kid, I learned to connect with the waves. First, you watch it build, a swell of energy beyond the breakers. Then, you wait as it finds its shape. Some waves remain a swell, not breaking until they’ve reached the shore. Those are overs: you can easily float over the top as they pass. They leave you in your place so you can wait for the next one. Others form a sharper peak and you know they’ll break early. They might be overs or unders depending on your location relative to the growing mountain of water. If the peak stays sharp, then it’s probably an over. Those are my favorite because you can crouch at the base of the wall of water, wait for slight current pulling you toward the wave, push off with all the force your legs can muster, fly up the side of the wave, and, for a brief moment, take flight over the top before crashing down into the water on the other side. The wave continues toward the shore while you revel in the aftereffects of taking flight.
The thing about the ocean is that the waves keep coming. You can’t gloat for too long, you have to let go of even the best feelings because the next swell is already taking shape behind you. This one might also form a sharp peak, but it’s different. The peak begins to fall apart into a curl. It’ll break before you have a chance to tame it. It’s an under. The wall rises in front of you. It’s so tall you think, “This is the one. It’s going to grab me and take me all the way to shore.” A shot of fear as the current tugs at your waist. Once, as a kid, I swear the wave rose as big as a movie screen in front of me. It was the biggest wave of my life. Because you know how to read the waves, you know that you must dive under. You take a deep breath, and, before it falls apart into a white foamy mess, you dive headfirst into the base of the mountain of water threatening to swallow you whole. You feel the current call you toward the shore. You hear the peak break above you. You’ve gone deep enough that the wave simply moves you a few inches toward shore and then releases you. It passes over you and you rise unscathed on the other side. The wave rushes toward shore while you wipe water from your eyes and breathe deep the humid, salty air.
And then the next wave is upon you. It might be an over or an under. You might misjudge and come tumbling into shore; or you might time it all perfectly and ride the wave in glee or fear but come out on the other side. The only constant is that the waves will keep coming and with every one you must watch, wait, listen, and decide how you’ll handle it.
I remember all of this when I see Kabat Zinn’s words. I can’t stop the waves, but I can learn to ride them with the same excitement, fear, and release that I practice in the ocean.
While Kabat Zinn’s advice resonates with me on an individual level, there’s more to life than solitary wave-riding. We must ride the waves alone, and we must also rely on others to keep our collective selves afloat. This brings me to the fire ants.
Over the past few weeks, flooding in Queensland, Australia, has caused massive flooding that has resulted in over $2 billion in damages. These kinds of stories call up pictures of dilapidated homes, washed-out roads, and boats rescuing survivors. Thoughts of animals usually focuses on pets and perhaps uniquely Australian species of snakes, kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas. But what about the smaller insects? The fire ants? What happens to them?
Unfortunately for us humans who might be glad to never again see a fire ant, flooding has contributed to a booming fire ant population in and around Queensland. While we might ride out rising water by learning to surf our individual waves, fire ants forge a collective solution. Instead of drowning in rapidly rising water or even fending for themselves over and under the waves, they lock themselves together to form massive rafts where together they float on the water until they reach dry land.
If you’re like me, seeing a picture of a raft of tens of thousands of fire ants sends a shiver through your body. I certainly wouldn’t want to have a surprise encounter with this pile of stinging insects, but their survival strategy seems a stark contrast to the individualistic surfing metaphor of riding the waves of life. These ants sense the rising waters. They begin to move their queen and eggs to higher ground. As the water rises, they continue to work together by creating bridges with their bodies so that the other ants in the colony can come together into a raft formation. When the raft begins to float, they safeguard their most valuable asset, their queen, by keeping her on top oalong with the eggs. The ants on the bottom constantly rotate to the top to keep from drowning. And they float. They can’t control their direction. They simply float until they reach a place where they can build a new colony.
What if we reacted to crisis like fire ants? In the face of adversity, we’d band together, protect our most vulnerable, and wait until things settle so that we we could build a new life together. Yes, life brings waves every moment of every day. Sometimes the ocean is calm and you get lots of floaty swells. Other times, it’s frothy with wave after wave of scary breakers that keep you on high alert. We have to ride those waves.
But sometimes we’re all in a flood together. The challenges aren’t so much waves as a continuous rise of water. We can go it alone for a while, but soon we’ll drown in the stubbornness of our rugged individualism. Instead of fighting over limited resources, we could instead band together to uplift our most vulnerable and float atop the crisis, all the while taking turns to keep the raft afloat until life brings us to a new shore where we can begin building our next life together.
We don’t have to go it alone. If the fire ants tried to survive individually, their entire colony would perish. If we keep closing in on ourselves, hiding from the world when we’re drowning or when the waves become unbearable, then we too will have lost the collective spirit we need to survive. The fire ants teach us that fierce togetherness keeps us alive until life lets us begin anew. We can’t control what life sends our way, but we can control how we float and ride the waves.
