And, finally, there was peace in the universe 10-7-05

My wife and I had a class together on Thursday nights. This Thursday, she met me in the parking lot a burger joint across the street from the community college. (We only have one parking pass.) I was standing in the parking lot next to my truck. The fins of my surfboard hung over the edge of the tailgate tellingly. She parked and opened the back of the mini van and I put the surfboard in. It was the 7'-6", so it filled both rows of the vans cabin space.

She handed me a bowl of reheated spaghetti. I thanked her.

"You don't sound too good." She said.

"I wouldn't think so." I replied. "I feel like complete shit."

It was the truth. I was a sick as a dog. My throat was sore and course. My nose was suffed in the back with small leaky channels draining the thinnest of liquid constantly. I'd rubbed the area under my nose raw with tissues. My head hurt horribly.

"You never listen to me." She said. "I old you you shouldn't be surfing when you get a cold coming on like that."

She had told me that only two days before. But, it had been months since I'd been surfing consistently, and Brett and I had agreed to meet Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in the mornings.

"Actually," I told her. "when I'm surfing I feel fine. It all this damn working that sucks. What I really should do is go surf for three hours tomorrow morning, skip that damn working thing, and go home and rest."

What a happy, fleeting thought. It would never happen, though. I'm too much of a workaholic to do anything so sensible. Actually, I had brought work with me to do in class. Imagine that. In college, I used to stare off into the walls and doodle while not paying attention to my teachers. Now, here I was bringing wiring diagrams and controls sequences to class to work on while I occasionally pretended that I was listening.

It was also true that surfing was the best I felt all day. The cool water soothed my head and my joints. The salt opened up my nose. The crisp air over the ocean felt like a clean medicine in my lungs. The waves had been fun, too. There was an elusive north swell filtering softly into the beaches all week, never quite getting to be good, but wavering just below. Plus, the mornings were rising tides to pretty high tides. Surfers at 8 or 9 o'clock found nothing, with the tide so high that the mediocre waves couldn't push through. But, the 6 o'clock hour had been a little better, with peaks and mounds of waist to chest high waves pushing through the tide. Brett and I had caught our share of fun rides, a good re-introduction into the sport we loved.

Halfway through the economics lecture, I finished my work and sat back to listen. There was no point in starting to take notes, my wife had been scribbling profusely since the lecture began. Besides, I'd read about four economics books in the last year and browsed the extensive collection of theory on Wikipedia. There wasn't much in this class that I needed explained twice.

Our teacher was talking about the Multiplier effect. In economics, it is said that there is a multiplier effect to money. If Joe Blow the billionaire gives me $100, I'll probably spend it all. Out of what I spend, it will go to various companies and their employees, most of whom will spend it right away again, and so on down the chain. So, $100 added to the economy can generate $1000 of economic activity, if ten people touch it and re-spend it.

The teacher smiled and asked a question. "Is there anything else in your life that has a multiplier effect?"

The class was stumped.

"Anything in your life where you get more from it than what it really is?"

The class was silent. A few mummers bounced around the back.

"Surfing." I said.

She smiled, and motioned to my wife. "This guy really likes the surfing, eh?"

The class chuckled.

"Explain. Why?" she prodded.

"Because you only have to surf one hour in a day to have a good day." I answered plainly.
To the classes surprise, my answer was right. "Many people say exercises" she went on. "Or yoga, or meditation. Something that they say gives them more than what the put in to it."

The next morning, I caught two handfuls of waves. The rumored swell never came in, but I didn't really care. I was paddling around, catching little fun waves. I saw some surfers I knew in the water and said whatsup to them, did some low turns, some falling dismounts. I even swam underwater between sets, dragging my surfboard behind me by the leash as I took five or six breaststroke strokes under the cool water.

I got out, got dressed, went into the office, ignored all calls, and pushed like a bulldozer through the last three hours to make a 12:00 deadline. When 11:00 a.m. came, I sent out the package, drove home, took some medicine and went to bed.

In sleep, I dreamed of a foggy autumn morning at the Huntington cliffs with nice, small fun waves, families of dolphins swimming by, pelicans swirling overhead, and a fun board - a dream quite like the morning I'd had. I surfed one hour that day, and for all I cared, there was peace in the universe.