Mindfulness and Surfing - Sam Bleakley (Leaping Hare 2016)

The surfboard…allows you to translate the energy of the moving wave into an experience felt so deeply in your body, mind and spirit that you sing out.

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This is a short, interesting book that dips into many ideas (its index includes Externalism, Heidegger, Rimbaud and Xenophon) without getting bogged down in any. It surfs fairly cleanly over them, in fact.

Bleakley is a respected and decorated longboard surfer, and this is his contribution to a series of titles by various authors, which connects mindfulness with, amongst other things, Einstein, baking and raising chickens. However, it rarely feels formulaic and Bleakley’s commitment to preserving ‘coastscapes’ while developing new surf spots – particularly in Africa and Asia – comes across as passionate and sincere. His nods to the franchise come in the form of ‘Mindfulness Exercises’ at the end of each section, but these also constitute interesting asides about surf culture or language, and would presumably be of practical value to someone reading next to a surfboard on a beach.

Bleakley is good on the history of surfing, linking the bracing ‘Cornish rinse’ to Polynesian royalty; in particular, he’s good on the history of surfboards. As with most technological development, some advances are serendipitous (Bob Simmons is advised to take up surfing to rehabilitate a broken arm, but finds he has to create a lighter board just to be able to carry it) and some are not (as the aeronautical material fiberglass becomes affordable, it supplants balsa as the shaper’s preference), but all are interesting. And, with the technology, surfing style develops. The book sketches the characters credited with key wave-riding innovations – Phil Edwards’ ‘drop-knee turn’, Dale Velzy hanging ten – fitting them into their surf eras and cultures. Bleakley also has a go at broader contextualizing, for example, suggesting the creation of the Simmons board as representative of post-war American ‘individualism, capitalist enterprise and social benefit’.

However, for me he is at his best when explaining the personal effect of surfing, on himself or on others from first-hand observation. His experience of surfing in China confirms the ‘bodymindful’ theme of his book: that an inside-out, rather than an outside-in approach is best. If you adopt this, he believes, you move from ‘ego to eco’ – an in-tune relationship with your environment that is essential to your contentment and its preservation. He draws on the ideas of philosophers, sociologists and poets to emphasise the need to ‘let the ‘I’ dissolve in the ‘we’’, while remaining sufficiently self-aware to joke along the way (‘now I am sounding like Baba Ram Dass’). And he has done a lot of ‘mindful surf travel’. He’s taken his established Cornish longboarding skills to the emerging surf destinations of Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone and China, and he provides brief but vivid portraits of each, including their music, language and festivals.

Moreover, the writing is good. Bleakley drops in lines from Ibsen, Longfellow and Coleridge, but his own turn of phrase can be beguiling, expressive, joyful: ‘Surfers must inhabit a thin line between fish and bird at the ocean’s skin, and bust out their carnival moves as the thunder of sets rolls by.’