Criticism

One of the best songs on Taylor Swift’s album, evermore, is “Champagne Problems,” which she co-wrote with Joe Alwyn. While fans have mined Swift’s songs in an attempt to peer into her personal life, I’m more interested in Swift’s ability to use her songs to comment on aspects of the female experience seldom explored in music, or explored, but only haphazardly so. Swift claims that her songs are based upon fictional characters and scenarios, but much like a poet writing a persona poem, the characters offer a channel through which the artist can explore difficult themes common to all of us. The songs resonate not because they are confessional or not-confessional, but because, in their ability to fictionalize raw experience, they capture something true about the human experience.

Elle reports that Swift herself has said that “Champage Problems” is based upon the premise of two college sweethearts meeting for a night, one with a plan to propose, and one with the plan to break up.

Google “rejected engagement proposal” and you’ll find cringeworthy stories of women saying no to marriage proposals in front of basketball stadiums, women saying no in front of the guy’s family, women running away. In many of the stories, a woman is put on the spot and is forced to answer an intimate question that involves her entire life in front of friends and family, or worse, strangers.

Engagement proposals are incredibly romantic, and they can be wonderful.

But.

If a romantic engagement proposal happens after a couple has sat down together, discussed their future, and mutually agreed that they want to spend their lives together, (and both understand what that means), a marriage proposal can be a beautiful celebration of that decision. But when a marriage proposal comes without such a discussion, and especially when it occurs in a public setting or among family and friends, it can become coercive. A woman put on the spot might feel forced to say yes. And if she says no, she becomes that woman. The fictional character in “Champagne Problems” is that woman.

The woman wants to break up and the guy, either clueless, or so thrilled and wrapped up in his own feelings that he doesn’t consider the girl’s feelings, proposes. The core of the song is the theme of miscommunication in relationships, and the heartbreak that follows when two people are in different places. 

The song is excellent because not only does it capture the woman’s pain in such a scenario. (We are always so quick to see how painful it would be to be the guy, but Swift puts the focus on how it also hurts to be the girl; I sure wouldn’t want to be the girl in that scenario.)

Swift is also deftly able to show how the culture perceives such a woman. Swift sings about the town talking afterward: “She would have made a lovely bride/ What a shame she’s fucked in the head.”

When a man isn’t ready to commit, he’s commitment phobic, or just young. When a woman is not ready to commit, she must be fucked in the head.

In its ideal form, the marriage proposal is a public performance that enacts an authentic sentiment. I think of how so many of Shakespeare’s plays concern themselves with the blurred lined between the authentic and the performative. The audience doesn’t forgive the actor who reveals the performance as such. In a marriage proposal the guy is the active agent, and all the girl has to do is provide a passive yes.

The public ceremony of the marriage proposal reinforces the idea that women are to be passive, even when making important life-altering decisions. I think a marriage proposal can be an incredibly romantic celebration (and therefore a performance), but if it is not a performance for the woman, but rather an authentic question posed in the moment, then I think the public marriage proposal is problematic. Is Swift seeing this when she sings “One for the money, two for the show?”

Swift manages to deftly capture the way the culture responds to a woman who doesn’t “play her role” in such a scene. The people talk about the girl and console the guy telling him he’ll “find the real thing instead.” But what is the woman’s “real thing”? Does the culture even care?

And this comes back to Swift herself. Seventeen magazine writes about the “gossip often spread about Taylor, specifically those who talk about why she isn’t married yet.”

In many ways, we still live with the Victorian mentality that if a woman reaches a certain age and isn’t married, there must be “something wrong with her.” Swift, who is 30, is at an age when many women in her peer group are decidedly settling down (or have settled down already).

Why isn’t Swift married? “I couldn’t give a reason,” she sings. In response to the societal pressure to get married and reproduce, more women are choosing to do neither and aren’t offering excuses.

“Champagne Problems” is interesting in another way. There are enough songs about women leaving cheating men, leaving men who emotionally abused them, leaving men who were no good, but what about the song about a woman leaving a good man, whom she still loves? What about the song about a woman leaving a man who loves her enough to commit?

Swift imagines a world where a woman can say no, without just cause–and sing about it.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

In her stunningly beautiful collection of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer opens with a stunning essay called “Skywoman Falling.” She explains that she gives her General Ecology students a survey every semester. When asked to rate the negative interactions humans have with the environment, the students are quick to identify the ways in which humans negatively affect the environment. But when the same students are asked to identify any positive ways humans interact with the environment, the students are often at a loss.

Kimmerer observes that modern conservation must not be the story of the “Fall,” a replay of the Adam and Eve story where men and women’s actions exiled them from the garden. Conservation must come from a position of abundance, one of healing and forgiveness, atonement and hope.

When the ancient Hawaiians arrived in this archipelago around 1,500 years ago, they transformed the natural environment, clearing forests to grow food, bringing with them imported plants that changed the natural ecology of the island. When you look at Hawaiian agriculture, the goal was not for humans to be invisible, but rather, to live sustainably on the land. If you overfished, you had no food. It was imperative that resources be managed.

Conservation is an action, but the foundation of any action is a story.

Joan Didion famously wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” and indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about conservation may be just as important as the acts of conservation themselves. If we tell ourselves a story of a hopelessly destroyed earth, we may feel that conservation is a hopeless and futile act, the voice of one person alone crying in the wilderness.

But what if our stories were different?

Humans are just like any other creature on this planet. Just like any other creature we are subject to the laws of nature, though the fancy concrete boxes in which we live and metal boxes on wheels that get us places might tell us otherwise. When there are more people than food and water, people die. This is a simple fact. When there is disease, people die. This is a simple fact.

If we begin to view ourselves just like any other creature subject to the laws of nature, we might begin to look at how other creatures survive in their environment and maybe search for ways in which we might, as humans, co-exist in our environment, giving as much as taking, healing the rift.

I have always believed that individuals have a powerful rational and intellectual inborn ability to do the right thing. We each have a frontal lobe that helps us understand what is right and what is wrong, but as a culture, as a society, I have often believed that we don’t have a frontal lobe. Culture is not a person. It is more like a mold, growing wild in all directions, subject to whatever environmental factors will eventually lead to its demise.

Perhaps the way out might be through storytelling. With the right stories, with the right values, maybe we can find a cultural frontal lobe that can carry us forward.

To heal a landscape, we must hear its stories. The ecologist Gary Nabhan uses the term “re-story-ation.” More than that, to heal a landscape, we must tell the right story.

In ancient times, Hawaiians built rock walls out of lava rock that protected parts of the ocean from the vagaries of the Pacific Ocean. Within these “water pens,” Hawaiians farmed fish. Ancient fish ponds could feed whole communities along the coast, and allow those communities to trade with upland farmers.

Today, across the island of O’ahu, groups of people are coming together to rebuild these ancient fish ponds. They are doing the work by hand. They are doing it in the old ways.

The fish ponds are acts of cultural and ecological healing. They heal the landscape, because communities come together to remove invasive species like mangroves from the coastline. They heal the communities, because people come together to do the work with their hands. They heal the people, because in coming together, the ancient stories are told, the practices are revived, and the gods are once again called forth from the deep to feed us. And through the fish ponds, we can perhaps once again feed our communities and make Hawai’i more sustainable. Atlas Obscura writes about a fish pond in He’eia, but there are others, including one I have been granted permission to visit in Pearl Harbor, whose Hawaiian name is Loko Iʻa Pāʻaiau.

When we talk about conservation, we must be creative in how we manage our resources and co-exist with nature. Kimmerer writes that it is each of our responsibilities to use the gifts we have been given for good. Perhaps if we want to be better conservationists, our first step should be to look within ourselves, for our own talents and gifts. What can we give the earth for all she has given us?

Kimmerer writes about nature’s gifts in her breathtakingly beautiful essay “The Gift of Strawberries.” She writes: “Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning it. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.”

But Kimmerer notes that gifts come with immense responsibility. The gift changes hands and ties together each hand it touches. “A gift creates ongoing relationship.”

Gifts can exist within capitalism, but in a system where ownership is a method of exclusion, gifts once given are excluded from the system of gift giving. Kimmerer explains that “the fundamental nature of gifts” is that “their value increases with their passage.” Sharing is fundamental. In a gift economy, reciprocity, not rights, are central.

We conserve the earth, because the earth is our gift. But we live in a world detached from this gift. Kimmerer notes: “When the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return—that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.”

What is the answer to all this? Kimmerer offers a solution I have long thought about and considered. She explains, “Refusal to participate is a moral choice.” We can choose not to buy it. We can choose not to buy the suffering, the plants irresponsibly grown. Or we can buy what otherwise would be thrown away, which is what my boyfriend and I do when we buy vegetables in Hawai’i. We buy the ugly food. The food in the discard pile. The food that would be wasted. Sometimes, the food is freely given to us—a gift. And we are learning to forage, not because I think that all of us foraging would become a sustainable solution, but because foraging connects me to plants, earth, and to the place my food comes from. It makes me think more carefully about the choices I make, and how they impact the planet.

“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”

I was not born in Hawai’i, but Hawai’i matters to me. Its people, its land, its culture, its history, its animals. I am tied to them. I have put the food of the trees in my body, and the island is my body. I have put its water in my body, and I am its water. I have heard its stories, and its stories are my heart.

In Waikiki, a baby bird once fell out of a tree and landed on a man’s shoulder, while the woman was out in the sea. When the woman returned from the sea, the couple tried to return the bird to the tree, but its nest couldn’t be found, so the man and woman raised the bird as their own. The bird was demanding. It needed feeding every hour or two. When the time came to release the bird, the couple met a kind man and woman who had turned their home into something of an aviary. The man and woman took the caretakers of the bird to a valley where the birds lived. There they met the keeper of the valley. He was a wise old man. He showed them, directly and indirectly, how they might feed themselves. He brought them to the fish ponds.

Sometimes, when we give gifts to nature, nature reciprocates in strange ways.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

There was a moment in Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility that gave me chills, that somehow put into words something I had been trying to articulate for years, but didn’t quite have the words to frame. Isn’t that the work of the best writing—the ability for a writer to put together the right words, in the right order, and speak truth to what had previously been silent?

DiAngelo writes: “Multiracial people, because they challenge racial constructs and boundaries, face unique challenges in a society in which racial categories have profound meaning. The dominant society will assign them the racial identity they most physically assemble, but their own internal racial identity may not align with the assigned identity.” She goes on to write: “the dynamics of what is termed ‘passing’—being perceived as white—will also shape a multiracial person’s identity, as passing will grant him or her society’s rewards of whiteness. However, people of mixed racial heritage who pass as white may also experience resentment and isolation from people of color who cannot pass.

I am white. I am also Puerto Rican (on my father’s side) and Cuban (my mother’s side). I am Latina. I am all of these things and none of these things because I have never been completely white among the company of white people and never completely Latina among my Latinx friends. I find myself feeling the creeping pall of inauthenticity, a creeping sense of insecurity even as I write these words. What would it mean to be able to label myself accurately or comfortably?

What am I?

My mother is Cuban. She moved to New York with her mother, my grandmother, when Fidel Castro rose to power. My father is Puerto Rican and English and Portuguese and Spanish. His mother was born in Puerto Rico, and he spent several years of his life growing up in San Juan, playing hide and seek in El Morro fort. When my father moved to Miami from Puerto Rico he was forced to repeat a grade in school because there were no resources for English language learners. As a result, when I was a child, Spanish was banned in my household, even though my grandmother spoke little English. My father didn’t want me to be held back in school (an irony because by the time I went to school in Miami, my entire 3^rd grade class was made up of English Language Learners).

Perhaps Hispanic or Latino is too broad a category, as the recent election has only highlighted. Cuban-Americans decidedly voted for Donald Trump, while Puerto Rican Americans voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. (I voted for Biden.) Simply put, Cubans vote Republican because they fear the specter of communism. There is a real belief among many Cuban-Americans that Democrats might usher in the next communist revolution.

One of the things that DiAngelo notes is white people’s racial insulation. According to DiAngelo, white people can live largely oblivious to race and to its implications. My race has always been a question, something I’ve either had to defend, or something that has been noted by others, either by its absence or by its presence.

This was another moment in White Fragility that truly struck home for me, something I had not realized before reading the book. “…like most white people raised in the U.S., I was not taught to see myself in racial terms and certainly not to draw attention to my race or to behave as if it mattered in any way.” 

I can’t imagine what it would mean to go through my life without the question of “race,” but I know what it feels like to pass for white, to be invisible and to enjoy those privileges of invisibility, and also what it feels to be racially marked, to be the “white girl” in a Latinx neighborhood and school, and also what it means to be the Latina at an all-white family gathering in the deep south. It didn’t occur to me that some people in America never had to envision themselves racially, but I recall being shocked to find that the neighborhoods where my college boyfriend’s parents lived were largely racially homogenous (white) and coming from my background where I’ve always lived in racially diverse neighborhoods in Miami, it didn’t occur to me that people would live like that.

DiAngelo notes that European Americans have been afforded the ability to assimilate in a way that people of color have not been able to assimilate. I look white; I look European, and therefore in many situations I have been granted this privilege of assimilation. My Latinx friends and classmates who commented on my whiteness were accurately commenting upon this reality. For moments in my life, among strangers, I have been able to “pass.”

At the same time, my upbringing, my cultural heritage, my accent, and other aspects of my background have made it difficult for me to “pass,” to assimilate as white. For example, among my ex-husband’s white family, I was never considered white. My accent has changed over the years, but in college my “Miami accent” marked me as Latina among the deep southerners I encountered.

DiAngelo writes: “If we ‘look white’ we are treated as white in society at large.” But what if we look white but don’t sound white?

As America becomes more diverse, as more people identify as multiracial, we need to add more complexity to our dialogue. In America, we love simplicity and binaries. But what if things are not so simple? Race in America is complex.

I live in Hawai’i, and the island had only recently re-opened to tourism in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. One morning, not so long ago, I decided to paddle out to surf in Waikiki, a place I rarely surf these days because it is often too crowded and I try to avoid crowds to avoid getting sick. In the line-up I overheard some men talking about how “selfish” it would be to travel at a time like this. How “mainlanders” (in other words, tourists, in other words, white people) travel to the island trying to get away from whatever situation they’re dealing with out there. They could have the disease, get it on the plane. Not everyone was taking the pre-arrival COVID tests, after all. And the tests could produce false negatives. I suddenly got the creeping sense that the conversation was somehow passively-aggressively directed to me. One of the men looked my way, and sheepishly asked: “I was wondering if you’d mind my asking where you flew in from?” I calmly explained that I lived down the street, that I hadn’t seen my family on the mainland for almost two years (because they sure as hell had no intention on getting on a plane at a time like this), and that no, I hadn’t been on a plane recently. My Miami-accent came out. The man asked me if I was Latina. Once again, as I have done all my life, I explained my background.

I wasn’t angry at the men in the water. I understood. I myself have crossed the street to avoid getting close to tourists. Even in the surfing lineup, people have formed pods. In Hawai’i, during the pandemic, the aloha spirit carries forth in everything we do, which includes wearing masks, obeying local orders (which, for the most part are based on science, not wishful thinking), and rigorous self-quarantine. In Hawai’i, we understand that not every state has implemented the same protections against COVID-19. Surfing has been permitted throughout the pandemic, but social distancing is observed in the water. Strangers in any context pose a real risk of contagion, especially on an island where communities are tight-knit and medical resources scarce. The men asked me the question they asked because they were indeed concerned for their health. A tourist in the lineup might mean that they need to get tested for the virus to protect themselves and their families.

But never had I felt so white. Never had I felt that it might do white people some good to spend some time in Hawai’i, where whiteness is racially marked like it is nowhere else in the United States.

A final thought: a very good article on mixed racial identities and Hawai’i was published in the New York Times. The article discusses the complexities of racial identity on the islands. The article is titled “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawai’i.” The writer, Moises Velasquez-Manoff explains, “in Hawaii, being mixed was so common as to be unremarkable.” (The author notes that Hawai’i has the highest percentage of mixed-race people than any other place in the country, and notes that Barack Obama, a man of mixed-race, was born in Hawai’i.) White children, when surveyed in Hawai’i, tended to not have essentialist views about race. They were not “race-blind” but were less likely to think that race defined a person’s essential traits. They were more nuanced when asked to identify people on the basis of race.

In fact, people who visit Hawai’i can also be positively influenced, changing their perceptions of race. Mainlanders who studied at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa “lost the essentialist ideas that characterized their thinking about race when they’d just arrived.” Why did the white mainland students change their ideas about race? Velasquez-Manoff notes that “white mainland students often find themselves in the minority for the first time in their lives. And that’s not always easy.” The Times notes that white students drop out of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa at the same rate as students of color drop out from white universities on the mainland. For the first time in their lives, white people in Hawai’i no longer can enjoy the racial invisibility and blindness that DiAngelo describes in White Fragility.

Hawai’i is hardly a racial utopia. I have seen firsthand the overt racism expressed against people of Micronesian ancestry. And Black people remain a minority. The specter of colonialism breathes through the racial and socioeconomic disparities one observes on the island.

People of mixed race still face challenges in modern America. Velasquez-Manoff  writes: “Researchers have documented how the unique challenges encountered by mixed people can, depending on social context, negatively affect their mental health.” And yet, being of mixed race has its benefits. Mixed race people score higher in tests of creativity.

I thank my background for my ability to more easily adjust to life in Hawai’i, something I do think would likely be more challenging for those who are white (simply because it’s hard to be a minority). I do know that my diverse background has given me many gifts, gifts I’m still learning to appreciate.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

In the game of chess, the Queen’s Gambit is an opening in which white opens by moving first the pawn in front of the king, and then, if black mirrors in response, white moves the pawn in front of the bishop. This opens a path for white’s queen to make moves. Black can then either take the pawn (the Queen’s Gambit accepted) or decline to take the pawn (the Queen’s Gambit declined). The Queen’s Gambit allows white to take control of the center of the board quickly.

Sound confusing? There’s a helpful video that illustrates and explains it all on the Chess Website (which, I imagine since Netflix’s premiere of the Queen’s Gambit, has been getting a great deal of traffic lately).

The Queen’s Gambit involves two competing forces: control and sacrifice. It requires white to risk a pawn (possibly to sacrifice a pawn) for control. And indeed, The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix series directed by Scott Frank, is aptly titled. The series is about Beth Harmon (played by the wonderful Anya Taylor-Joy), a young orphaned female chess prodigy whose sacrifices are at once subtle and profound.

If chess is a metaphor for life, the sacrifices one makes to gain advantage in a single game can often mirror the sacrifices one makes in life to gain advantages of the same. Harmon sacrifices relationships and her childhood in order to excel. She is warned that this will be a reality of her life by her teacher, the janitor at her orphanage, who explains that she has great talent, but that her talent doesn’t come without its price. In the Queen’s Gambit, the price may be a pawn. In life, the price is often more consequential.

Harmon’s life is ultimately shown to be a lonely one punctuated by addiction and obsession (at least until SPOILER ALERT, the last episode, where she makes amends to everyone).

I found myself disappointed by this easy tidying up. To assume that relationships could be easily repaired by winning a game is an illusion best left to Hollywood. The Queen’s Gambit indulges heavily in the fantasy that success of any kind will somehow repair all deficiencies in an otherwise deficient life.

And yet, the Queen’s Gambit does comment on something important. As Carina Chocano wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “Nobody cheers for the girl genius while she’s out there. Being a genius.” The Queen’s Gambit does indeed offer an alternative to the idea that female genius must either be institutionalized or buried. In fact, as the story progressed, I actually believed Beth Harmon’s story was memoir, not fiction. I thought the story was following in the footsteps of Hidden Figures, where female genius that had long been hidden from the spotlight was finally being granted its due. The Queen’s Gambit is not memoir, but is rather, based upon a novel written by Walter Tevis.

It is, sadly, a work of fiction.

I say sadly, because Beth Harmon could not exist in our world. Ours is not a world that easily forgives (or celebrates) female ambition. Whether you’re trying to compete on the chess board, or anywhere else, there’s always someone who will tell you that you don’t belong there. Beth Harmon is told she doesn’t belong in the chess world, but she quickly puts her detractors to shame. And she’s celebrated for it. She defeats men and they want to sleep with her. She gets press. She’s isn’t sexualized solely for her fabulous style (which she has in abundance), but because she has real talent.

This is a fantasy world I wish existed. Yes, in 2020, women may compete in the world, and often on the same playing field as the men. And though we might not overtly be told we don’t belong (not always, at least), there will always be subversive ways we’re told we don’t belong (CNN reports that the gender wage gap means that women make 78 cents for every dollar earned by men). The women who put their detractors to shame are seldom celebrated for it. A successful woman is feared, not desired. And our wins are often followed by the press, always quick to cast the achievement underneath some kind of shadow. (I think about the sheer glee with which we delighted in the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes—putting aside for just a moment whether the downfall was deserved, her narrative follows a familiar theme, the idea that female success must be a fluke, or better yet, a fraud.)

There’s an immense cognitive dissonance that must be overcome when you’re being told that being female makes you incapable of doing something; when you’re told you’re just not good enough. A New York Times article on how The Queen’s Gambit has revealed the challenges that female chess players face, notes that Garry Kasparov once said that playing good chess was just not in a woman’s nature. Society and societal expectations can go a long way to holding a woman back, especially a little girl. According to Elizabeth Spiegel, a chess expert, boys tend to be overconfident in chess, while girls are more measured. In chess, as in other areas of life, overconfidence can be the difference between success and failure, and sometimes be the difference between even making an attempt. The New York Times also notes that lack of social support often leads to many women giving up chess. If my experiences in surfing or rock climbing are any indication, I imagine that these are also reasons women give up other endeavors or fail to excel. If you don’t have mentors or can’t see a path forward for yourself, few have the courage to blaze a new path.

This is not a problem unique to chess. The overconfidence of boys translates perhaps into more failures, but also into more wins and success. The subtle and not-so-subtle discouragements can cause real harm to one’s confidence. The lack of female (or even male) mentorship creates gaps.

And then there’s culture. Success, strength, and genius are not often linked to femininity. Despite the push to remind girls that they can be more than pinups, the culture keeps reminding them that their value, strength, and sexuality derives from their looking pretty. What is intoxicatingly new about The Queen’s Gambit is that femininity is made analogous to strength, success, and genius, without the main character ending up in a sanitarium in the end.

What if we lived in a world where the queen, in the Queen’s Gambit didn’t have to sacrifice her pawn to take the center of the board? What if we lived in a culture where the queen didn’t have to start on a disadvantage to take control? What if the Queen could start with everything intact; what if she could really have it all?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Ours is a society that admires greatness, but seldom takes the time to do the cost-benefit analysis of what greatness truly entails. We love the great athlete: the Derek Jeters, the Kelly Slaters, the Federers, but we seldom ask ourselves what it means to be that good. David Foster Wallace is, I believe, one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century, but that greatness came at an immense personal cost. He was dead by suicide at age 46, to which I attribute no small part to his commitment to excel at writing even when the writing became a black hole that consumed him.

True greatness, transcendent greatness, has a price. Wallace addresses this in his famous essay about the tennis player Michael Joyce called “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.” Wallace is not only interested in the aesthetic beauty of tennis greatness, the sort of achievement that comes from “combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought.” He’s also interested in “what it’s taken for the 100^th ranked player in the world to get there, what it takes to stay, what it would take to rise even higher against other men who’ve paid the same price he’s paid.”

True greatness comes at an emotional, physical, and social cost.

In a stunning video produced by the New York Times, Alexi Pappas, an Olympic runner, speaks about the crushing depression that followed her time at the Olympics. She explains: “So many Olympians have experienced a mental health injury. In fact, a lot of people who hold themselves to extreme standards have.”

Pappas asks the wonderful question that we all ought to ask ourselves: “What if we looked at mental health the same way we do physical health?” What if we explored the mental reasons that underlie the pursuit of greatness at all costs.

Greatness doesn’t just require talent. Many people have talent. Greatness requires the maniacal will to harness that talent through training, through failure, through holding oneself to the most extreme standards. The great athletes and writers and artists weren’t just content being “weekend warriors.” They wanted more, and they held themselves to high standards along the way.

These themes have been explored more recently in the stunning Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit, a story about a female chess prodigy named Beth Harmon. Harmon is an orphan who learns chess from her orphanage’s janitor. He sees her greatness immediately, but warns her that her talent will come at a price. The price of prodigy for Harmon is addiction, obsession at the cost of friendships, and immense loneliness. As the story unfolds, Harmon is given many opportunities to “have it all,” friendship and success, health and sobriety and accolades. Time and again she chooses solitude, obsession, and addiction. Is there another way for her?

In his essay on tennis, Wallace notes that when we look at the actual sacrifices athletes had to make, they “repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse or explode.” Wallace writes about the “impoverishments in one’s mental life.”

The great athlete, the great at anything, enjoys a “relationship to perfection that we admire and reward.” Wallace adds, “the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit.”

Maria Pappas offers another perspective, one that is perhaps, healthier: “a part of chasing a dream is that you have these ups and downs.” She approaches her mental health with the same perspective she approaches injuries: with the understanding that she won’t feel better right away, and the understanding that healing takes commitment. She talks about seeing her counselor three times a week, the same way she would see her physiotherapy. If only insurance companies took her model to heart.

And perhaps, greatness doesn’t necessarily require such obsession or the cost of one’s mental, social, and physical well-being.

Female surfers may be showing us another path to greatness, one that doesn’t require a complete sacrifice of the self to a single and solitary pursuit to the exclusion of everything else. We women are notoriously good at multi-tasking. There have been studies performed on that very thing. In a documentary about Paige Alms, The Wave I Ride, the great champion big wave surfer takes on Jaws in Maui. We watch her not only surf Jaws, but also work as a contractor constructing houses, getting creative with a paintbrush, hanging out with friends and family, surfing casually with her boyfriend. In a profile about her in Surfing magazine, we learn that she makes a living as a waitress and doing construction.

Maybe these female athletes offer us another way. Maybe greatness doesn’t have to require a complete loss of self. What if greatness could include many great things?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Wim Hof has been studied, doubted, and believed. He has been written about in the prestigious science journal Nature. He has been followed by journalists looking to “expose” him as a fraud only to find themselves transformed into believers and promoters of his method. I’d only heard about Wim Hof occasionally in popular culture and in the occasional endorsement I’d hear among surfers looking to increase their ability to hold their breath underwater (an important skill if you plan to surf big[ger] waves).

I decided to take a closer look at Wim Hof given that he’s published a new book. In The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential, Hof reveals how he has managed to perform extraordinary human feats of cold exposure, like climbing Mount Everest in shorts and a t-shirt. The book is part-memoir, part workbook, offering readers exercises to help them become superhuman. I’m fascinated by people exploring the outer limits of human ability, and am especially fascinated by the methods these figures have used to achieve these heights. In many cases, the drive, passion, commitment, and obsession is similar in all feats of human excellence, but the specific activities differ. What’s unique about Wim Hof is that he claims that the preparation can be the same in all cases.

When you read an athlete’s memoir, rarely does the athlete claim to have the ability to teach you how to follow in his or her footsteps. Typical athletic memoirs recount the years of dedication, the early morning trainings, but they don’t propose to offer their readers a path to the sub-two-hour marathon or triathlon greatness. Hof is unique in that he claims he can show ordinary humans how to achieve extraordinary feats—if they are willing to put themselves up to the challenge and perform his exercises daily. He writes of ordinary people able to acclimatize to altitude to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, of ordinary people able to endure extraordinary cold without even a sweater.

Hof’s method is simple. It is based on “cold exposure, conscious breathing, and the power of the mind.”

As I read Hof’s book, I wondered whether it would be possible to apply some of his methods to my own practices to achieve results.

I have practiced many different types of meditation over the years. There are passive forms of meditation that require nothing more than for the person to sit still, focus on the free-flowing breath, and patiently wait for transcendence to arrive. For years I practiced this type of meditation. Attending Josh Korda’s Dharma Punx NYC meditations exposed me to body scanning techniques, loving-kindness practice, and others. While living in New York, I even tried breathwork, a much more active type of meditation (I felt euphoria and experienced mild hallucinations, a not-uncommon experience). I’ve been guided by Joe Dispenza on hypnotic journeys through my energy centers, where I have “opened up the field” and have had some of the deepest insights about my life and purpose in the process. I have practiced cold and hot exposure. Hiked barefoot. Stayed up for days on end. Sat under banyan trees that have been struck by lightning. Pushed my body to its limits. Some of it sounds woo-woo to write about, but experience and description are often different continents, and I’ll grant the skeptic his or her skepticism for finding some of this all too far afield.

Meditation, in all its forms, is powerful. Before I began regularly meditating, I was chronically depressed and angry. Bipolar disorder runs in my family. Meditation, however, is a slow-acting medicine. It took years before I began to see real results, but one day, I woke up and realized that I had indeed changed my mind and body, without medicine, but with patient attentive breathing. It was remarkable.

Since reading Wim Hof’s book, I’ve been using Hof’s breathing method for several weeks for my meditation practice. I was, indeed, able to achieve deeper levels of meditation and more immediately access calmness and inner peace. I could even feel the physiological changes in my body. Hof’s breathing method helped me fall asleep without sleeping pills. I used his breathing method in the morning before I got out of bed and found myself more prepared for the day, calmer, less quick to anger or frustration (an essential skill given the ongoing pandemic and quarantine). I often found that I entered states of “timelessness” that Hof writes about in the book.

Hof’s method is located somewhere in between the active intensity of “breathwork” which produces a (hyper oxygenated state in the body), mindful breathing with its ability to calm and reset the mind and body, and breathing techniques which produce a hypo-oxygenated state in the body. I found I sometimes experienced the transcendent and even hallucinatory effects of a breathwork session, without feeling the extreme exhaustion such sessions often brought on. I also found that the sessions, when extended, allowed me to tap into deeper levels of insight and inner wisdom.

While scientists have only begun to explore how Hof’s methods actually benefit the human body (a few studies have produced positive results, but they remain small and subject to various confounds, including the “guru effect” Hof creates, just by teaching his method), Hof provides ample anecdotal evidence of clients who have healed themselves and excelled using his methods. Doctor Elissa Epel, in the introduction to the book, writes that Hof’s method works by putting the body into a state known as “hormetic stress:” “Theoretically, a stressful exposure can have harmful effects at high doses, but at low doses it can actually create changes in our body that make us healthier and stronger.” 

Hof believes that comfort is what makes the human body and mind stagnate. Ancient humans faced discomfort on a daily basis, and pushed their bodies past these discomforts. The human body, according to Hof, is designed to handle discomfort, optimal in its operation when pushed to experience occasional passing pain.

Doctor Epel, who studies Hof’s methods, writes: “The cold and the breath haven’t changed. Humans have battled the cold since the very first winter, and Tibetan monks have been practicing conscious breathing techniques for more than a thousand years.” There is indeed a difference between passive meditation that focuses solely on the breath, and meditation meant to induce a slight state of discomfort in the body. Epel writes: “The unique dialectical state of relaxing into physical discomfort and pain—of ice, of cold water, of breath-holding—I find this to be a remarkable state…I believe it is an especially interesting state from which to observe the mind.”

Hof believes that we are disconnected from nature, and this disconnection weakens us. He urges readers to immerse themselves in nature and its elements completely. I agree with him. There’s something to be said for the immediate effect nature can have on the body and mind. There’s something more to be said for the effect that extremes can have on the body and mind.

When I lived in New York City, I spent the winters surfing the cold water of the North Atlantic. I know it sounds awful, the idea of diving into ice-cold ocean water, but the experience was transcendent and invigorating. Yes, I dreaded the first shock that took my breath away. But every time, I left the ocean feeling high. I still remember the instant euphoria, my beating heart, the sense of pure wildness in all that dark water and fog. I found something true out there in the cold water.

“When this neurological channeling is reestablished, it enables us to endure pain by releasing the natural opioids—endocannabinoids—in our brain. These natural chemicals deliver a feeling of euphoria to the body, even under stress…”

You don’t need to jump into the North Atlantic to achieve the same feeling. According to Hof, a cold shower will do. He notes: “We have to sit still and meditate for hours to get the blood flowing into those deeper realms. Or, conversely, we can take a cold shower.”

Hof privileges experience over book learning. He urges his readers to go out into nature to gain experience and to delve deeper within themselves for the answers. Perhaps we’d all be a little better off if we took this advice.

In The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential, we learn about how Hof discovered his methods during his time of “opting out” of society, when he was living as a squatter, spending his days soaking in the cold water near his hometown in the Netherlands. He writes of the sacred early morning hours, “a very different dimension of the day, when nobody is around and you are there in sync with…the elements of nature.” He urges his readers to opt out of society, arguing that “it’s time to awaken to a mind that is not vulnerable to manipulation or corruption, that is 100 percent yours. How do you achieve that? By breathing, going into the cold, becoming conscious, reflecting the soul.” He critiques the capitalist system that “serves greed and ignorance.” A system that Hof calls “polluting, exploitative, and insensitive.”

Will cold showers and deep breathing heal the ills of capitalism and globalization? I doubt it. But I do believe that stepping out of one’s comfort zone and becoming more mindful can lead to realizations and awakenings that can put one on a different path, one that maybe doesn’t privilege consumerism so centrally in the equation.

Hof’s story is not without its tragedy. He writes of his wife’s suicide and the challenges of raising his children on his own. He writes about the people who called him “crazy” for years, doubting him. Ultimately, Hof’s story is about hope, about potential, about the inner power we each hold inside of us. Hof writes: “It’s amazing what can happen within your core if you get there, if you meet the light within yourself.” He writes about finding “natural wisdom” and the “sacred spot” within.

Great athletes, meditators, artists, lovers, and seekers are ever-searching for the moment of alignment, when mind and body perform in perfect synchronicity. We are all perhaps, in our way, searching for transcendence.

We stand in the darkest hour of a pandemic that may take many more lives before it is over, now may be a time to reassess what we find most important, most sacred. Hof wants his readers to find clarity and insight. I wish the same for all of you.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. There’s something unique about friendships between writers, a kind of intimacy and distance that can only be achieved when a friendship is forged by the bonds of words rather than by the bonds of proximity, shared interest, or by the commonalities that define so many of our other friendships.

The great essayist Michael de Montaigne wrote that love in friendship is a “general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest.” He contrasts this love with sexual love, which is “fickle, fluctuating, and variable” and “but a mad craving for something which escapes us.”

For Montaigne, friendship is “a matter of the mind.” Unfortunately for Montaigne, he didn’t believe in friendship between women, explaining matter-of-factly that “there is no example yet of women attaining it” and so we leave him right there.

Writers, being writers, can be remarkable at analyzing the vicissitudes of friendship.

Glennon Doyle on Friendship

“I love people but not in person. For example, I would die for you but not, like… meet you for coffee. I became a writer so I could stay at home alone in my pajamas, reading and writing about the importance of human connection and community.” Untamed. Glennon Doyle. Amen, sister.

In Untamed, Glennon Doyle explains, matter-of-factly, “I am not a good friend. I have never been capable of or willing to commit to the maintenance that the rules of friendship dictate.” She explains that she can’t remember birthdays, doesn’t ever want to meet for coffee, and won’t text back, “because it’s an eternal game of Ping-Pong, the texting. It never ends.”

Realizing she couldn’t live up to the rules of traditional friendship, Doyle explains “I decided I would stop trying. I don’t want to live in constant debt.”

So, when Elizabeth Gilbert offers to be her friend, she initially hesitates. But writers are good at analyzing the unwritten rules we live by, and may be better able to re-write those rules.  Writers are also very good at making their own rules. Gilbert “offered a new friendship memo: that for us there would be no arbitrary rules, obligations, or expectations. We would not owe each other anything other than admiration, respect, love—and that was all done already. We became friends.”

What do we owe our friends? The beauty of friendship is that we get to decide.

Doyle explains, “At this moment, I have 183 unread texts. Texts are not the boss of me, and neither is anybody who texts me. I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating.”

I sympathize. There are only so many hours in the day to answer emails and respond to texts and to write essays, to meditate, to do my job and do it well, and to work on my poetry and to work on my art; there are only so many hours to go surfing, and make coffee, and dance, and feed the birds that visit me. If I spent all day responding to every ping like a Pavlovian dog, I’d never get through the meditation, never finish the essay, never write the next poem, paint the next painting.

My friends live scattered across the country and the world. I live in Honolulu, Hawaii, the most remote city on earth. I have friends in Portland, Seattle, San Diego, New York city, Toronto, Miami, and beyond. This means that when I need a good heart-to-heart, the heart-to-heart happens over the phone or through text messages, but the outcome is the same. Friendships are forged on the bonds of admiration, respect, and love, not on whether I’ve had coffee with you in the last month. Perhaps if I was measured on the traditional standards, I’d be a failure, but my friendships are strong. My closest friends have been my friends for decades, or years. When we really, really need each other, we’re there.

My strongest relationships have thrived because they honored their own rules.

Jonathan Franzen and Farther Away

In his essay, “Farther Away,” Jonathan Franzen writes about his friendship with David Foster Wallace. He sums it up like this: “the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill.”

Franzen, in his essay, “Farther Away” writes that the writer is often unknown to himself, unknown to those closest to him, and often connects most closely with the strangers who find solace in his work. About Wallace, he writes, “it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of people closest to him.” In fact, Franzen notes, “Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe.” Wallace connected with those who had immense difficulty connecting, which perhaps explains why his readers feel so “comforted” and “loved” when reading his work. Connection is formed on common ground. If your common ground is isolation, alienation, depression, anxiety, and loneliness, a literary voice that unapologetically expounds these things will draw you in its cold embrace. I have to agree with Franzen that “to the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island…his most susceptible readers are ones familiar with the socially and spiritually isolating effects of addiction or compulsion or depression.”

Cheryl Strayed on Friendship

In a life with competing priorities, maintaining friendships can be difficult. Strayed writes, in one of her Dear Sugar columns, “One of the greatest anxieties of these last several years has been that I feel like I’m not as good a friend as I want to be.” There’s a balance that arises when we honor our priorities in life. Sometimes we don’t always have time for the weekly coffee catch up. But Strayed notes, “every season or so,” she says “‘OK, it’s been three months since I’ve seen you. We must get together.’”

It’s delightful to discover that friendships can exist near and far, that the bonds of friendship can be forged on words as much as they can be forged on proximity. Read Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, read Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away, or read my review of Glennon Doyle’s Untamed here.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Several years ago, completely beside myself in wit and humility, I got it into my head that I’d make it a goal of mine to surf a “big wave.” Because the definition of “big wave” is rather vague, I set the “humble” goal at about 30 feet. In order to fully illustrate the absurdity of this goal, it is important to note that the most intense surfing I’d ever done was at Rockaway Beach in New York. I’d paddled out for the Nor’Easters, but hadn’t really been in the water with waves of consequence, much less surfed them. It wasn’t until I found myself in the ocean in Puerto Rico in a rising swell that I understood that waves could get much bigger, and that I might have to rethink my mental scale. (When I moved to Hawaii, I’d have to rethink that scale again; more on that later.)

But this isn’t an essay about the conflicts of measurement between the Hawaiian wave scale and the scale used pretty much everywhere else. This isn’t an essay about big wave surfing—a big wave surfer I am not. This is an essay about humility.

David Foster Wallace was probably one of the better writers of the 20^th century, and he was best in his nonfiction writing about tennis, where his attention to tedium and effusive style balanced with the need for specificity. I don’t really care much about tennis, but Wallace’s philosophical approach to the game makes me care.

One of David Foster Wallace’s classic essays about tennis is his piece about Michael Joyce, a relatively unknown tennis player who was ranked in the top 100 in the world, but hardly at the top of the game. The piece is called “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.” There’s a point early in the essay where Wallace invites the reader “to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.”

This is relevant to my story because without realizing it, I was perhaps setting myself a more ambitious goal than I realized when I told myself I’d surf a 30-foot wave. The surfing world has (somewhat) objective measurements for determining its top female surfers. There are contests for that, contests for which I will never qualify. But what does it mean to be top in the world as a big wave surfer? The World Surf League has rankings for big wave surfers, but how many women in the world have surfed a 30-foot wave, or a 40-foot wave—for that matter? Queen of the Bay’s invitee list includes 28 female athletes. There are more women who surf big waves than this, I know for sure. But how many?

Are there even 100 female big wave surfers in the world? And what does it even mean to be a “big wave surfer?”

Carissa Moore, the four-time World Surf League World Tour Champion says she only surfed Waimea Bay once. Moore gives a tour of her home in “At Home with Carissa Moore: Presented by Subaru Hawai’i,” and shows the audience her big wave board. “This is my big wave board,” she explains, pointing to a yellow gun on her wall, “but I’ve only used it once at Waimea and that freaked me out, so now it’s up on the wall.” Surfing a wave once does not a big wave surfer make.

And what does it even mean to “surf” Waimea Bay? I’ve paddled out on empty days when it was “small” (7 feet, 8 feet, and one day where it was rising to maybe 10) and I know that doesn’t count. I’ve been out there with a bunch of tourists who wanted to be able to say they “caught one at the bay.” And yes, I’ve caught a few waves out there, but the wave felt “small” even then. I don’t know how to explain it. It didn’t have the power of serious surf at that size. I don’t even own a big wave gun surfboard. Would 15 feet at Waimea Bay even qualify as “big” enough? Maybe 20 feet would count? At what point would it count?

Red Bull’s Queen of the Bay event only runs if the waves in Waimea Bay are scheduled to be 18 to 20 feet. Emily Erickson was quoted in the same article as saying, “I’ve heard people say we should run it smaller, like in 15 feet, just to get a contest in… I think it has to be 18 to 20 feet to be proper Waimea.” And I believe her. Maybe 15 feet Waimea Bay just doesn’t have the juice. I wouldn’t know.

What is a big wave?

Fortunately, I found a partial answer. I found a helpful article in the San Francisco Chronicle called “A Brief History of Women’s Big Wave Surfing.” The writer, Bruce Jenkins makes the following note: “To establish parameters: The standard for big waves begins at 15 feet by the so-called Hawaiian measurement. That’s 15 feet as measured in the open ocean, a still unbroken swell. That generally translates to a 30-foot face as the wave encounters shallow water—a reef…” This gave me some comfort, because 15-foot Hawaiian had been my goal. At least I had enough of an understanding to set a proper goal when it came to measuring what would be my standard of success.

The article goes on to note that “As recently as 1988, there was no evidence of women having surfed a 20-footer.” On 20 to 25-foot days at Waimea Bay, the book “North Shore Chronicles,” mentions only men. In the 1960s and 70s, a couple of female pioneers took on big waves. Jenkins notes that a woman named Layne Beachley was towed (by her boyfriend, Jenkins takes pains to note—I don’t see why this matters) into a 25-foot wave at Outside Log Cabins on the North Shore. Only recently have female big wave surfers even made the news. The World Surf League only held its first Women’s Big Wave surf contest in 2016.

Keala Kennelly (my hero) is the modern-day master and female pioneer of the big wave; the female equivalent of one of the best in the world, if not “the” best.

Kennelly has set the standard for female big wave surfing, dropping in on terrifying huge barrels in Teahupo’o, a wave I have no interest of ever surfing. Kennelly is a master.

To illustrate her mastery, I’ll tell you another short (and humbling) story. A while ago on the south shore there was a day of pretty significant (for me) swell. When town gets swell, everyone heads out to sea. I remember paddling out and feeling a little timid about the energy I felt out there for some of the waves (I also hadn’t been surfing every day at that point, because I had been busy working on finishing a book of poetry). Kennelly posted some of her waves that day on her Instagram featuring beautiful aerials and impossible looking turns. Her caption in the comments? “#southshore has been #firing. People think I don’t enjoy surfing small waves but I absolutely do.” Ouch. Small waves? I wouldn’t have called those waves small.

The more I understood what it felt like to surf 7-foot waves, the more I felt humbled, and the more I thought about David Foster Wallace’s essay about Michael Joyce.

Wallace writes beautifully about encountering levels of play, levels of competition “so distinct that what’s being played is in essence a whole different game.” Wallace’s experience watching Joyce play in Montreal is, he admits, his first experience watching professional tennis live. “I… confess that I arrived in Montreal with some dim unconscious expectation that these professionals—at least the obscure ones, the non-stars—wouldn’t be all that much better than I. I don’t mean to imply that I’m insane…In other words, I arrived at my first professional tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance.”

Wallace’s realization that he has never played “the same game as these low-ranked pros” makes him incredibly sad. I can relate.

I arrived at the North Shore with the same “deluded pride that attends ignorance,” a unique state of mind one experiences when one encounters levels of achievement so great they cannot even be imagined. I could vaguely think about surfing a big wave, but I had no clue what I was talking about. I thought I’d show up, paddle out into the sea, and learn how to catch bigger waves. How hard could it be?

When I first saw Sunset Beach on a big swell, I just sat on the sand under a tree, my mouth opened in awe, and my hands shaking as I watched several young women paddle out into what appeared to be their certain deaths without looking the least bit phased. I was truly humbled. I just wanted to lie fetal on the sand and take a nap.

Surfing is an interestingly egalitarian sport. In tennis, in order to occupy the same court as a Federer, Agassi, or Sampras, you need to be truly good (or have a lot of money). You can’t just show up to the court on a day Federer is playing and expect to knock around a few balls. As David Foster Wallace noted, it would be “obscene” and “absurd” for Wallace to think he could ever occupy the same court as a reasonably good player like Joyce. Wallace explains: “I could not meaningfully exist on the same court with these obscure, hungry players. Nor could you.”

In fact, in Wallace’s essay, one of the things Joyce is most proud of is the fact that he has been flown to Vegas “at Agassi’s request to practice with him, and is apparently regarded by Agassi as a friend and peer.” Wallace notes: “these are facts Michael Joyce will mention with as much pride as he evinces in speaking of victories and world ranking.”

In order to play against an Agassi or Federer, you need to be invited; you need to be good.

But in surfing, each wave is its own court, its own field of play. (My comparison between the tennis court and ocean is not so far-fetched; it appears William Shakespeare made a similar comparison in Pericles, writing “A man whom both the waters and the wind,/ in that vast tennis-court, hath made the ball/ for them to play upon, entreats you pity him.” The ocean is the court and the field, but in surfing, the ocean belongs to everyone. In order to compete for the same waves against the pros, you just need to watch the surf report and paddle out on a good day. (Mostly) no one will tell you to go home (unless you make the cardinal sin of getting in someone’s way or if you pose a danger to yourself or others, which happens). If you follow the surfing etiquette, put in your time at the lineup, show humility, and wait your turn, even the best pros will give you a wave eventually.

Still, it’s one thing to paddle out and be out in the lineup with a professional surfer, and another thing entirely to really have the right to be there. I have sat in the lineup with professional long boarders and have found myself on the same waves accidentally, but these accidents are just as “absurd and in a certain way obscene” as David Foster Wallace thinking he could hit around a few balls with Agassi or Joyce. I don’t meaningfully occupy the lineup.

Perhaps my thinking that I could surf a 30-foot wave is similar to thinking I could meaningfully occupy the same field as a pro baseball player, or basketball player. What if I just didn’t belong out there?

Imagine someone going out onto one side of the tennis court, trying to learn to serve, while Agassi was on the other side, practicing his serve for the U.S. Open. This is basically how I felt trying to catch waves at Queens where masters like Kelis Kaleopa’a and Honolua Blomfield were also there, dancing, defying gravity with grace, poise, and perfect style; their toes always on the nose, while I flailed around trying to take one step in that vague direction, shuffling around, dragging my feet, and falling head-first off the front, a move I liked to call “walking the plank.” Maybe I learned something from them by watching and taking up space, but I certainly didn’t belong in the lineup.

There are moments when I think about how wonderful it would be to someday message Kennelly and ask if I could maybe shadow or paddle out with her on a bigger north shore day, but I also understand that to do this would be, to borrow Wallace’s words, “absurd and in a certain way obscene.”

Since I moved to Hawai’i, I’ve surfed most every day (taking occasional weekends off and time off to nurse injuries or fall in love). I improved as a surfer, in the way one improves when one devotes time every day to an activity. I would hardly say I’ve trained the way a professional would train, but I’ve put in time in the ocean, more time than the average person for sure. South shore swells once terrified me (though I’d paddle out into them anyway). Now, all but the largest south swells feel pretty routine.

North shore swells are a completely different beast.

In order to surf a big wave, you need to be a good surfer. The physics involved in catching a wave is too complicated for me to describe here, but it involves perfect positioning on the wave itself and in the ocean, angle of take-off, timing of when you stand up on the board, and subtle decisions about the path you take once you’re actually up and riding the wave. Then there are the individual idiosyncrasies of each wave and wave break and beach, that involve currents, where the wave breaks, how it breaks, how the lineup works, who is in the lineup, blah, blah, blah…

I think I understood in my logical mind that I’d need to get good, possibly great, but I don’t think I understood this in my gut, and when it comes to taking stupid risks, the logical mind’s fear centers can often be easily overridden, while the gut’s fear-centers are far more effective. When I moved to Hawai’i to try to surf bigger waves, it didn’t occur to me that I’d have to actually get better. I just figured I’d get braver and the rest would work itself out. At no point in the mental calculus did I take into account the fact that I’d only been surfing for about three years, that I’d never surfed in waves of consequence, and that I’d really had no truly frightening experiences in the ocean. Maybe I had the bravery part figured out from my days of rock climbing without a rope, but the common sense part and skill still needed work.

Either way, my fearless approach would change.

Putting value judgements on natural phenomena is dangerous, but big waves on the North Shore can be best described as freakish. In order to surf a wave—any wave, small or large—the wave must generally have a shape conducive to surfing. Think of a series of dominos falling, one after another. When surfing a wave, you want the wave to break like that, like a series of dominoes falling one after another. That left to right collapse of the wave gives you a path on the water. If the wave breaks all at once, you can’t really surf the wave. If it breaks all over the place, you can’t really surf it either.

When surfing waves, you want to be pretty close to where the wave first breaks and then stay as close to that spot as possible.

 When waves get very big on the east coast, they tend to get disorderly, and therefore are not surfable. But when waves get big in Hawai’i’s North Shore, something miraculous happens, they don’t get disorderly. They don’t “close out” or collapse all at once. No. They break in an orderly and predictable manner. Of course, as the wave gets bigger, only some breaks in Hawai’i will “hold” the size. Some places, like Sunset Beach, Pipeline, and Waimea Bay will “hold the size,” the waves falling predictably and reliably like a beautifully laid out domino configuration, while mostly everywhere else on the North Shore will be a mess of huge white water, the water falling all at once like a table of once-ordered dominoes that has been kicked and shaken.

The reason why this can happen is largely why the North Shore of Hawai’i is called the “seven mile miracle.” Anywhere else and the ocean would be a dangerous roiling mess of white water and unsurfable chaos, but in Hawai’i, the waves get big and orderly. This is because of the bathymetry of the ocean floor. Offshore, under the sea, you’ll find reefs. But these aren’t just any kind of reefs. These reefs are structured in a manner that allows them to channel the energy of the ocean in a precise way to create surfable waves.

Being out in the ocean when the waves are bigger, but breaking in an orderly fashion is like nothing else on earth. You feel like you’re somehow defying the laws of nature. How can it be that the water can move like that, that the wave can be that big, and yet you can find a place to sit in the water where it is still safe to watch it break? I have had many surf sessions where I haven’t caught a single wave. Where I have just paddled out and felt the power of the water. It was enough.

In order to meet my goal of surfing a “30-foot wave” I’d (in theory) have to paddle out on a day when Waimea Bay is reported to get a swell of about 15 feet (and if I wanted it to really, really count, according to Erickson, I’d have to paddle out on an 18 to 20 day). The Hawaiian wave scale measures waves by the “back” rather than by the front, so when the report says the waves are 3 feet, they are really more like 6, and when the report says the waves are 7 feet, they are really more like 14 feet, give or take a little or a lot. Because I’d learned to surf in the east coast, where the waves are small, powerful, and largely disorderly, the waves in Hawai’i were a pleasant surprise. Channels made it relatively easy to paddle out. The predictability of the ocean thanks to the reefs and underwater formations that shaped the waves (the bathymetry) made me feel confident swimming and paddling out in much larger surf than I’d ever dream of paddling out into on the East Coast or in Puerto Rico.

When I first moved to O’ahu, I paddled out in Waimea Bay when the surf was a small “seven to eight feet” and caught a wave. In my head, in those naïve days, I was halfway toward my goal. Marathon-running friends of mine had always told me that if you can do a half marathon, you can do a full because it’s basically the same mental and physical principle, but much longer. I figured the same might apply to big waves. If I could paddle out and surf in swell half my target “size,” I’d soon enough surf my 30-foot wave. 

Right.

But when the surf is small in Waimea Bay, the wave breaks on a part of the reef called “pinballs.” And when the surf is larger in Waimea Bay, it breaks elsewhere. I’d learn this on a day I tried paddling out on a rising 10-foot swell, realizing that I could no longer predict where the wave would break. It was terrifying, but because the waves were still “small” for Waimea Bay, I could paddle to the middle of the bay and safely avoid the reef shelf where all the action was taking place.

If I was going to improve as a North Shore surfer, I realized I’d have to stop surfing “small” Waimea Bay where I could always just paddle into the middle of the bay and avoid a pounding. I’d need go surf some of the other spots. These other places would give me my first real lesson.

It didn’t take me long to have an experience that truly terrified me. Since moving to Hawai’i, I’ve surfed all kinds of waves in all kinds of conditions, but I’ve never felt scared for my life. Yes, I’ve had a few fun hold downs (where the waves have tumbled me underwater for a long time), and I’ve even tomb-stoned (which is when the wave drives you down deep and your board sticks up in the water like a tombstone, and if your leash doesn’t snap, you can climb your leash to the surface like a rope ladder) and I’ve seen some big (for me) waves come my way—and even caught a few big (for me) ones—but I’ve never felt scared for my life. I’ve lost my board a few times and have had to go swimming, but in smaller south shore waves, where I felt pretty confident I’d make it to shore. I like to think I’m a pretty strong swimmer. I free dive and I feel like I’m reasonably good at holding my breath, and if I have one talent it’s my ability to see looming waves on the horizon and my ability to navigate the channels. I don’t often get waves on my head.

A few weeks ago, I knew I was pushing my limits when I drove out to the North Shore and saw the cleanup sets completely transform the normally orderly waves of the place where I surf into a chaos of whitewater and rip currents. The break wasn’t closing out on every set, but every 30 minutes, a wave would fill the entire horizon and collapse seemingly all at once, linking two surf breaks together in a manner I’d never seen before. When it starts looking maxed out, I know it’s big. Still, the outside sets weren’t frequent and the ones in between looked fun and big–good test pieces. I decided to give it a try, knowing I was pushing my limits. The report called for 8-foot waves, with an occasional 9-foot one, but the report the day before had called for much larger 12-foot plus waves. The truth was that I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I knew that if I got scared I could just paddle out to sea, where I’d be safe from the bigger sets.

Still, I’d never seen water move like that, and I’d never been in the water when it was moving like that. From the moment I started paddling, I could tell that the ocean was mean. I almost turned around and paddled back to shore. But when I got to the lineup, I felt okay. The funny thing about surfing any waves is that the chaos on the inside gives way to calm ocean when you’re safely beyond where the swell breaks on the reef.

I watched the water. I wasn’t quite ready to paddle for a wave, but I felt safe enough to inch myself closer to the takeoff zone, the place of highest energy where I’d actually be able to catch a wave. On the North Shore, you have to be close to this place to actually catch a wave, otherwise, the energy just passes under your surfboard.

I felt comfortable and started chatting with the guys out there. I let myself get distracted and that’s when I looked out to sea and saw the set coming. It loomed, rising with every inch, darkening the water, like something malevolent had gotten into the sea and had turned it bad.

I didn’t make it over the wave. I had to bail on my board, which is terrible and something you should never do. I dove deep under and got out on the other side okay, but the wave had my board in its grip. The leash snapped.

I don’t really know how to describe the shock I felt. I felt naked, vulnerable, and scared.

And so I found myself swimming, without my leash, as more waves loomed on the horizon (I don’t even know how big they were anymore, but they were bigger than any wave I’d ever seen). I had a decision to make, paddle back to my board or swim for my life out to sea. I chose to swim out to sea. Breathing deeply to stay calm and prepare myself for a hold down in case I got a wave on my head. When the cleanup sets passed, a kind man and woman helped me get my board.

Safely reunited with my board, I paddled out to sea to think about things. I used my climbing knot skills to tie my leash to my leg. I thought about stupidity, and hubris, and bravery, and ego. More waves came through. I watched a young woman catch waves and even walk to the nose on some of them. David Foster Wallace’s writing about skill so transcendent it was almost obscene for someone like me to be out there came to mind.

I saw a sea turtle get sucked up into the lip of one wave. Even the sea turtles seemed to be having a bad day (except for that amazing woman). I waited until a space between sets and paddled back to shore.

One of the kind men in the lineup followed me back in. I asked him if I could have handled the situation better. I had decided to swim out to sea rather than swim back to my board, after all. My board had gotten caught in the washing machine and I worried if I swam back to get it while the cleanup sets were rolling through, I’d get caught in the washing machine too.

He told me I did the right thing, but he asked to look at my leash. I lifted it up. It looked like a creature had bit it clean in half.

He showed me his leash. It looked industrial grade.

“This,” he said, pointing to his metal-reinforced leash, “is a big wave leash. I use it because I don’t want to be swimming out there. I know you don’t want to be swimming out there either. Get a better leash. Come back tomorrow. It will be a little smaller.”

I went home and ordered a big wave leash. I’m also taking my swimming more seriously in the mornings.

When you’re learning something new, there’s ignorance that comes from knowing the dangers and then there’s ignorance that comes from not knowing the dangers. There’s also knowing something intellectually and knowing something viscerally, in your bones, from experience. Anyone can tell you that heartbreak hurts, but there’s knowing it hurts and feeling it and living it. I always knew my leash could break and that I’d have to swim if it did. I just didn’t know what it felt like. What it meant, in my bones. Now I do.

I went home that day, crawled into bed and cried for hours. I cried because I was relieved to be alive, cried because I realized that I was trying to do something impossible, cried because I didn’t realize how ignorant I had been to what I was trying to get myself into. I cried because I realized I probably couldn’t meaningfully exist on the lineup when the surf would be calling for 15 feet waves.

But now I own a big wave leash, a piece of surf technology I previously didn’t know existed. I don’t own a big wave gun and I know now, in my bones, how far I am from being a big wave surfer. If I told you an amateur tennis player was trying to qualify for the U.S. open at age 36, you’d think the person was crazy. Maybe my goal of surfing a big wave is just as nuts. I learned to surf at 30. I’m 36 years old, an age when most athletes are retiring.

But most days, when the swell calls for “solid” surf, I make the drive out to the North Shore, rain or shine, and try hard. To a real big wave surfer, these are not waves of consequence at all—I know this. But to me, they are my training ground, my proving ground.

I’m getting more comfortable in the water. I’m going for it more often.

Perhaps improvement is less about a sudden leap, and more about raising your game in small increments, pushing your comfort zone slowly in the direction of your goal, with humility, knowledge, and care.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.