Why ragdolling? I feel compelled to explain the name of this blog.

Riptionary, the online surf dictionary, defines the term as “to get drilled, rolled and tumbled by a breaking wave.” It’s a bit more than that - it’s that time when you’re bouncing around underwater, hitting the bottom, unsure which direction is up or down, literally tossed like a helpless pile of rags. 

I want this blog to be about surfing, and life, and the intersection of the two. More often than not, it’s not the perfect rides that are really analogous to anything we experience outside the water. It’s ragdolling. It’s being tossed around by some force a million times greater than yourself, unsure where you’ll end up.
Life is not a long, glassy wall. More often than not, it’s the soup.

I remember a crucial point in the process of learning to surf. It was the point at which I started actually finding pleasure in ragdolling. I would simply marvel at what the ocean was doing to me, and grew to like it.

And it came after I learned that the secret to getting through it, to saving your oxygen and making it to the surface, is in becoming a true ragdoll - going limp, not fighting, not swimming, not trying to get to the surface. Just relax, let the wave go on and roll past and expend its energy.

The lesson tranfers well to real life - one of a zillion lessons surfing has taught me about life. The older I get, the more I find there’s lots of things you can’t fight.  Lots of things bigger than you than can toss you around and make you feel small, like a ragdoll. You need to know when to let go, relax, and wait til you float to the surface. You will, eventually, float back to the surface, but only if you know how to ragdoll.