Mind Over Time

A surfer's frequent miscalculation.

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“I haven’t surfed in two months,” I said this morning as we drove through the light brown low desert leaving Palm Springs.

“That’s not true,” said my wife, as if holding the receipts of my last surf. “You surfed two weeks ago on Agnes’ board.”

I stood corrected, but it didn’t feel correct.

Following four decades of a life lived where riding waves was the number one priority, a sudden halt to that requires serious recalibration. All my lapses in surf time expand into epochs in my mind. And the consequences for disregarding time become greater as one ages.

“You have an insane relationship with time,” she said, clearly motivated by a deep dissatisfaction with my concept of passing time.

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And she’s right. I’m not sure if it’s a surf thing, or a dude thing or a me thing, but when I say five minutes, it can mean anything from 10 minutes to two hours. It never means five minutes.

I once thought it was a charming little hiccup surfers had. Like sand in the bedsheets. Or nasal drip. Annoying to some, but endearing to those who long for salty kisses and a life by the sea.

When I’m not surfing, my concept of time, as demonstrated this morning by my uncertainty around how long it had been since I rode a wave, is totally fraudulent. Time lumps up differently. And despite a packed itinerary full of grandiose life memories for my family and daughters, without the water time, I’m just floating through space with no concept of where I actually am in this lifetime. I’m uncertain of my actual age, even. And God forbid you ask when I will be home from surfing.

A dude named Robert Levine wrote the book A Geography of Time — a book about how every culture keeps time differently. He notes that in Brazil if you’re two hours late that’s more than fine, and being on time is being a little eager. Or in Japan, if you’re not 15 minutes early you’re late and rude.

I wonder what he’d think of surfers. Based on his arguments in the book, he’d diagnose us as living in “event time”, where our most (and possibly only) relevant “event” is surfing and time spent not-surfing is unmeasured, vague and irrelevant.

One paradox of all this time talk too is that I can tell you exactly what time it is at any point in the day with no watch or phone thanks to an innate register of the light and sun placement in the sky. But ask me how long I just surfed for and I will have no idea if it was 30 minutes or 3 hours.

This presents a particular problem for a married man with responsibilities and I am working through it. Operating in something as ethereal as “session time” presents particular challenges when your significant other operates in something Levine called “clock time.”

I pondered all this for a good portion of the drive this morning. And when my daughter asked from her car seat “How much longer ‘til we’re home, daddy?” and I announced “Five more minutes, baby!” while the navigation right in front of me read 15 minutes, I realized I have a problem. I think it’s time to go surfing.—Travis Ferré