Karma

Bali is the Island of Karma, its native inhabitants are of the Hindu Religion and they strongly believe in it. Its a life philosophy for most of them which they follow quite accurately.

Apart of the surfing one of the main reasons to return so many time to this island was the peaceful Hindu Religion. 

I also believe in the Karma philosophy and I try hard to follow it on a daily basis in every possible situation, even though my ego sometimes crosses my plans and seduces me to act out of pure selfishness.

Young Balinese girls at a Hindu Procession.

When it comes to Surfing I get quite greedy sometimes. Especially when I am confident about a wave I start acting like a fool, which is not good, afterwards I regret my actions and apologies are expressed.

There is a very true saying in Portuguese which says “ As desculpas não se pedem, evitam-se” which means “You shall not ask for apologies you shall avoid them (in the first hand)”.

One of my "greedy moments".

So its a good learning process for me to be more of an altruist and share waves with others, instead of wanting to take them all.

This kind of thinking is also easy to put in practice generally in life.

If you are positive and share, then good things will come to you, but if you decide to be selfish and greedy, you definitely someday will meet someone who is even a bigger jerk than you. A hungry shark always finds a bigger shark and ends up being eaten.

Pulling in Padang Padang.

Anyway I have been really blessed the last couple of weeks, Padang Padang my favorite wave on earth, has been pumping lately. Its been delivering unreal barrels, I've rarely seen colors and shapes like that, nature's perfection is just unbelievable.

But its also been quite busy and when there are a lot of surfers and a limited amount of waves, people tend to get competitive and aggressive in the water its unavoidable.

I am no exception, you easily start getting stressed when you are out there and do not get any waves. You start paddling harder, you sit deeper and you give others nasty looks. 

People actually told me several times that I am a specialist in giving people dark looks, so one of my missions presently is to change that. How? Avoid dark looks, have positive thoughts and smile more.

This wave makes me smile.

This morning I went surfing at 5 am, it was still dawn, I so wanted to get the chance to surf some waves, without having to battle with all the crowds, so I went super early. When I paddled out the moon was still out, huge and big and the sun still far away from coming up.

There was only one guy out surfing.

I saw this first big set of waves rolling in, so I paddled in position and took off, the wave was pretty solid around 6 ft / 2meters and I made the first section but got badly caught on the second where the wave closed out on me I was dragged across the reef and hit my lower head, chest and right arm on it.

When I got back up, I noticed that two of my front tooth were partly broken and that I was bleeding quite bad around my chin, I had a big cut on the left side of my chest and I was feeling miserable, I started chatting with the other guy and he said it did not look that bad that I needed stitches, so I decided to stay and try to get a couple of more waves, the bleeding on my head would not stop and my modjo for the surf session was gone.

When the sun was coming up we were already around 6 guys and another guy joined us, without even greeting us he paddled straight to the peak and started hunting waves. This is considered in the surfing etiquette “sneaking” which is disrespectful.

Usually everyone waits for its turn, just as if you were at the cashier at the supermarket. But this guy did not care, so he was taking one wave and paddling straight to the first spot again, when he caught his second wave, he wiped out and broke his board, guess this was Karma at its best.

After that incident I got one more little wave and went back in, I decided to go to a Hospital just to be sure I had nothing serious.

I ended up getting a couple of stitches, they removed a couple of reef pieces out of my body and I had to get two vaccines due to the danger of infections.

At the Hospital

So what did I learn from all this?

Well there's a lot of waves and possibilities in life, lets be patience and its important to act selfless too.

As usual I am gonna end this post with a quote, which for a change is mine:

"When it comes to life leave your weapons at home and bring your smiles to the journey."

Alex Wirthl, Bali 2014