It is when the wave is high that you can surf

BIMBO CABIDOG

Years ago, I came across this quote on a poster: “As long as you keep sailing, there are horizons to explore.”

Since then the words would come back to me every time my life hits a snag and it seems that I could not go anywhere anymore.

Are you facing overwhelming odds right now? Look at the bright side. It is only when the wave is high that you can surf.

Once I lay on a hospital bed, crushed and broken. I was just lucky enough to have my limbs intact. But I was near death, or may have only come back from it. Blood pressure was zero from a whole night of hemorrhaging, hemoglobin count two. Breathing won’t proceed lying on my back. Skin was ashen, lips violet. Only one fly needed to sign my death sentence.

From the bottom of a smoky pit, I kicked back gasping. Feeling the doctor’s hand busying around me, I inhaled the revitalizing air, and gradually began to breathe normally.

The surge of revival made me defy the deadly searing pain that shot through almost every nerve of my body. But full consciousness brought in a prospect much paler than death. It seemed life had perfectly exploded, and everything ahead was only one big problem.

Well, it was 38 years ago, and I’m still here to occasionally remember the episode. I sailed through. Since then, I have kept on arriving at one horizon after another.

There is really no such instance when there is nowhere else to go. But I suppose that is how some people feel at some messy juncture in their lives. 

The road has come to a dead end. Nothing anymore lies ahead. Not true! At any impasse, a way to keep going on always presents itself. The only problem is if we don’t see it, or simply refuse to look at it.

It doesn’t mean that if you can no longer think of anything, there is nothing more to think of. The possible has no limit. Only the thought of it has. This is not science or logic. It is just that only the impossible is impossible. It is just that beyond knowledge is yet the realm of belief, and belief’s range is infinite.

I have never gotten to plan life able to rule out the uncertain, the unexpected outcomes. I have always been lousy at leading a systematic existence. It did not help that I was once an academic derelict, thinking he knows better than the teachers. In a period of repressions, darkness and seeming hopelessness, I dropped in and out of school.

But what you’re going to be, and where you’re going to be, will surely come no matter how faltering and unsure you are.

A college instructor once assigned me to write a career plan. I ended up writing why I did not need or want a career. That came out to be prophetic. I would lead a life of not treading the required or prescribed path, not avoiding to go where angels fear to tread, not living by the book. I wandered and meandered out of the way, that is: finishing school, getting a job, raising a family, acquiring conveniences that money can buy.

I may have been joking. But fate took me seriously. It would award me with a ceaseless string of debacles, frustrated ambitions and setbacks. Sometimes I just thought I was simply born a loser. Sometimes the setbacks got to the point where there seemed to be no more tomorrow. But who cares? I have grown to be inured with stumbling and falling.

When you are down, the law of gravity doesn’t say that you are going to stay there forever. The instinct is always to rise. There is an inner force that makes you spring back. The next turn is definitely not to die, unless as they say, it is already your turn. You may not want to live anymore, but you cannot afford to live dead.

Consequences of a particular fall can be worse than the worst. But Murphy’s Law has only temporary application. Even in the direst of times, things can already start to assume a sunny aspect. Thank that the chance given you is the last. The torment is over. Thank that the door has been shut. You no longer have to enter it. And who knows what’s inside?

Any auspicious outcome, any deliverance from the valley of the shadow of death, doesn’t even need a reason to happen. It happens on account of you.

Feeling like you’re leading a messy and chaotic life? Don’t dive into a quicksand worrying. Don’t impetuously throw your life away, because nothing good seems to be going anymore. There’s another way of looking at it, waiting to be worn like a new pair of glasses. You are experiencing the rough edge because it is passing away. Remember, all things must pass.

Every experience is worth it: the happy and sad, the sound and the sordid, the easy and the hard, the blissful and the sorrowful, the pleasant and the painful, the elating and the humiliating. You can’t add to or deduct from any of them by shirking in front of each one’s time. Look them in the eye. Accept what has come, and even give thanks.

The mind always questions. It questions what it doesn’t like, what it hates, what hurts. Why is this happening to me? What have I done? It presumes that these things should not have happened at all, or they happened because somebody has done something wrong.

Take it from higher intelligence. You are having them, because you have the light. The light that is in you is the same light that shines on everything, carves every experience, brings every piece of beauty or ugliness before you.

In the end, every rise or fall is just how we see it. The passage of an adversity can never be more devastating than the thought that says it is. When you meet what appears like Mr. Misfortune, don’t tarry longer than the time you need to greet him. Look him eye to eye and bid him your friendly goodbye.

The seas are not always calm. They are neither always rough. Sail on and set your sights to the exploration of new horizons. Mind you, there comes the radiance of the high wave beckoning for an adventurous and fulfilling surf.