Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach teach: “The waves do keep coming, so learn to surf.”
When I got sober, I thought: if I just deal with the drinking, my life will calm down. The chaos will resolve. The waves will stop. What I was picturing — though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time — was that sobriety was the path to a state of reduced difficulty. Handle the addiction, get to the plateau.
The first time I got fired while sober, I learned this was not how it worked.
Life kept happening. Deaths, conflicts, financial pressure, relationships falling apart — none of it stopped because I stopped drinking. It just arrived without a buffer. No substance to take the edge off, no numbing agent, just me and the full force of what was happening. I had to actually feel it. All of it. The waves didn’t get smaller. I just had to learn to be in them differently.
Dan Harris describes “wise ambition” as doing everything you can while understanding the final outcome is out of your control. This is surfing. You can’t stop the wave or change its direction. You can learn to read it, position yourself, and move with it rather than against it or under it. The skill is in the response to what you can’t control, not in eliminating what you can’t control.
Sylvia Boorstein has a line I return to: “Life is difficult and we can handle it.” That second clause is everything. Not “life is difficult but” — some qualifier about how it shouldn’t be or won’t always be. Just: we can handle it. As it is. Coming as fast as it comes.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “When you stop expecting things to be different, you can appreciate them as they are.” The waves aren’t the problem. Resistance to the waves — the insistence that they should stop — is the problem. And every morning of practice is building the specific capacity to meet what’s actually there, rather than what you wished were there instead.
The waves keep coming. They have kept coming. They will keep coming. This is not bad news — it’s the actual shape of a human life. And learning to surf it, imperfectly, repeatedly, starting again each time you wipe out, is the whole work.
