How to live life using the ‘Surfer’s Code’

World champion surfer, successful entrepreneur and inspirational speaker Shaun Tomson shares the life lessons he's gathered from decades of surfing — from his boyhood adventures in South Africa to the world tour in the late 1970s to the business world today — in "Surfer's Code: 12 Simple Lessons for Riding Through Life." Read an excerpt:

I had brought a longer board than usual to the beach, a 7’7” that I normally only rode in the Hawaiian Islands on a big day. As I sat on the sand and watched wave after wave pound the shore, I honestly did not think the swell could be surfed. The waves were simply coming in too fast and breaking in shallow water. But every so often a wave hit the sandbar and peeled perfectly. A freight train, certainly, but one I might manage to hang onto with the longer board. Now if I committed to the wrong wave, I would get driven head first into that sandbar.

But if I picked the right wave. ...

I jumped into the rip tide, knowing there was only one way back to the beach. As soon as the rip pulled me beyond the jetty, I began to prowl the impact zone. I paddled for a wave, then backed off. I paddled for another, backed off again. It was extremely frustrating. I had so much adrenaline pumping through my body. I wanted to catch a wave, but I had to consider the possibility that I had been right after all, and the swell simply could not be surfed.

As I sat and mulled this over, rising and falling with these enormous swells surging underneath me, it occurred to me for the first time that I would not be able to tell which wave was going to hold up until I had already dropped down the face.

“To hell with it,” I said finally, and I paddled into a big one.

Gibbs Smith

At this extreme low tide, a lot of sand was sucking up the wave face. As I pulled my turn on the bottom and looked down the line, I thought I had just made the biggest mistake of my life. The wave looked like a sand cavern, only it was moving fast and now closing down on top of me. I could have bailed out right then, tried to use the momentum from my drop to punch my board through the back of the wave. I might have made it.

I will never know.

I had one line on that wave, and one line only, and I held onto it. It grew dark inside, and this is where I lose track of what happened exactly when. I saw an eye of light at the end flashing open and closed, now giving me hope, now shutting it down. I remember focusing on that tiny portal as it telescoped farther and farther away from me. I was falling, at that point, farther and farther back from the light, getting sucked back into the tube, and I thought, I’m not going to make it now. I’m too far back.

I was in a dangerous position, racing high on the wall right over the sandbar. If my board had been any higher, my single fin would have spun out of control. The section of wave ahead was mindless and walled up as far as I could see. No chance of escape at all.

In these extreme situations there is always the tendency to jump. Just bail off the back of the board and throw your arms in front of your face. Take the hit you know is coming. And sooner rather than later, because more speed is only going to make things worse. At least you have chosen the moment, right?

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It is fear that tears us down, and lack of imagination: I can’t keep this pace. I can’t ride any deeper. It’s not possible to go any faster on a surfboard and survive.

If I had had the slightest cushion of water beneath me, I might have jumped.

Suddenly, I heard the wave explode behind me. All this spray flew past — I felt it drive into my body like a gale — and it blew with such force that it actually lifted the board right off the water, and me with it.

My board and I were flying along completely out of the water now, inside the barrel, carried along by this blast of super compressed air. I was twenty or thirty feet back in the barrel, with this amazing sensation of flying through the air on a surfboard.

Many surfers will tell you that at certain times in the tube, at critical high speeds, they experience the sensation of the wave moving in slow motion. The body is reacting to danger. When you cannot fight, and you cannot run, the senses go to red alert where every nerve becomes a seismograph, registering and reacting to the slightest shift in the immediate environment. In this altered, hypersensitive state of mind and body, the wave actually appears to churn in slow motion. The result is that you feel like you have all the time in the world to react. Adjust your stance, dodge the lip, shift your weight forward or backwards, carve up and down the wall, anything that allows you to maintain your line and keep from getting crushed. The sensation is as palpable as a clenched fist.

I was flying along in almost complete darkness with the wave breaking around me in slow motion. Suddenly the board dropped back down onto the surface of the water, and I came flying out of the barrel into daylight.

No spectators were screaming on the beach, and no voices droning point totals over the PA system or camera shutters clicking away. I heard only the sound of the wind. And as I drifted over the shoulder, I looked back down to where I might have been. How thin that line is between doubt and imagination, between getting the blade of the axe or the handle.

Every surfer has a similar story. One moment they are being dragged into oblivion, the next they are flying along on the very breath of the wave. The feeling of time being expanded and distorted, of fear and exhilaration all melded together, these are rare sensations that replenish the spirit and sustain the soul.

A well-known poem by William Butler Yeats hangs above my desk at work, and I look at it every day: “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” The last four lines have always reminded me of that wave at the Bay of Plenty:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

I have so many associations when I read these lines: the sensation of flight, like the airman in the poem; the breath of the wave; the sense of danger; the commitment to fly in the face of that danger; and the importance of balance and imagination. Over all of these is the ultimate decision to live in the moment and to choose one path and follow wherever it takes me. That path is not a destination, which surfers are never concerned with while on a wave, but simply living with passion. I gain an enormous sense of calm knowing that I chose a path not for prize money or the accolades of others, but for what Yeats terms “a lonely impulse of delight.” In the end I followed my passion.

I see a complementary relationship between our actions in life and our imaginations where each defines, and is defined by, the other. This holds true for my surfing. The more I surf, the more possibilities open up to me, and the more possibilities I can imagine, the better my surfing becomes. And the richer the entire surfing experience.

Because surfing stays with me after I leave the waves — in the salt on my skin, the pleasant ache in my shoulders, that general sense of well-being that warms my whole body like a summer day — I can draw on those physical sensations to nourish the imagination and invigorate my life every day.

Excerpted from “Surfer’s Code” by Shaun Tomson with Patrick Moser, Gibbs Smith, 2006, 2011.