A neighbor unwittingly helped me figure out a problem with the 100 Thing Challenge. It’s the problem of experiential knowledge. There is much I can say (and will continue to say) about living more simply than American-style consumerism encourages us to live. Ultimately though, realizing the benefits that come from toning down consumption is a hands-on kind of knowledge.

Quite a few of our neighbors have noticed the surfboard on top of my car the last couple of weeks. In houses all up and down our street there are “Dave is surfing?” conversations going on. I struck up a chat with one neighbor about this. I explained that I don’t yet “surf,” but mostly just paddle around and get tumbled by waves. Then I asked him if he surfed.

“After about forty times trying,” he told me, “I finally caught a wave and turned down the line and rode it like the way you see the guys riding waves. I could look back and see the wave breaking behind me.” Then he made the comment that stuck with me. He said, “I finally understood. Now I got it - why they’re so hooked.”

I’ve had an experience like that before myself, not on a surfboard but nevertheless in water. It was the one time I went fly fishing. We hired a guide in Colorado for a day and spent the morning learning the ways of rivers, flies, and how to cast. It was much different than the lake fishing I was familiar with. Some time that afternoon I wandered upstream alone. I watched the river. I thought about the guide’s crash course on entomology. I noticed the quiet eddy across the way where a trout surely had to be restfully anticipating its meal. I worked the line out smoothly back and forth. All the noises of nature hushed for just a few moments, long enough for the line to spread across the surface of the river, the fly to briefly drift, the trout to swiftly move through water and leap through the air. Wouldn’t you know it, I had caught a trout fly fishing. Every sound imaginable, including the shock of the guide making his way upstream to help me land the fish, rushed back into my ears. “Now I get it,” I thought. I understood what all those fly fishermen are talking about.

Some things you just cannot wholly explain with words. That’s not a good reason to remain completely silent. It’s only an admission that life itself is more powerful than anticipation or reminiscence.

Most of American-style consumerism extracts profits before or after life happens. We pay to get ready. And we pay to remember (or else we pay in order to get more the next time). We rarely have to dish out money when we’re actually in the moment. Living a good, meaningful life usually doesn’t cost much when we are actually doing it.

I know I’ll never be able to fully explain the joy of living a non-consumerist lifestyle. And I am pessimistic, believing that the forces of American-style consumerism would never buy into a simplified life. There’s no profit in it. No big break. No headline news. So living a better life will always go a little against the grain of our dominant culture. Yet I am completely certain of this: if you stop participating in consumerism’s ruckus, in about forty tries, or maybe six months, you’ll “get it.” You will experience a different, better pleasure. Most of us will never look back.

Thirty-seven years after I was born and raised in San Diego, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 4 p.m., I surfed for the first time. Throughout my life people have wondered how a native San Diegan like myself could get through nearly four decades of life without ever surfing (truth be told, without ever having held a surfboard). I’ve never been able to say. It just happened.

Even now, I doubt my efforts to learn to surf this summer would have much force if it were not for a few life circumstances. I’m no longer a practicing entrepreneur, having sold my stake in a company I helped build. Thus my work hours are not of my own choosing, which means my loyal mutt Piper and I no longer run a few miles each morning. He’s sad, and I’m out of shape.

Instead of “working for myself” (entrepreneurs like to say they work for themselves, but that’s probably the falsest of all the claims they make), I now work for Point Loma Nazarene University, which happens to sit about three hundred feet above and a quarter mile east of the Pacific Ocean. And I work with a non-San-Diego-native surfer, who’s my de facto instructor.

The last reason that’s motivated me to take up surfing is harder to explain. It’s probably a mixture of middle-age restlessness, desire to overcome challenges and fears, a longing to fill my life with activities that are both physical and natural, the pleasure of doing something that impresses my young daughters, and accomplishing a goal that seems as unlikely as any I can imagine. “Waterman” is the least-likely moniker anyone who knows me would call me.  I do also have a sneaky suspicion that the next six months of attempting to surf might provide metaphors for my book about the 100 Thing Challenge and simplifying my life.

Though it did take two purchases to get into surfing: a wetsuit and a surfboard.

Four times. That’s how many times I’ve paddled out. It has taken only four attempts at surfing to conclude that I need only two things to learn to surf this summer. Humility and time. Likely a lot of both, though probably mostly humility. The third time out, I strained an oblique. The fourth time out I aggravated it, and added an egg-sized knot on my right foot from getting hit by my board. I managed to catch about three waves I’ve ridden on my belly, though I do plan to stand up eventually.

More to come...

A day after taking our children to see Pixar’s new movie Up, it occurred to me that they really could have called it Down. Well, except that “down” is not as positive a word as “up” and probably would not have created so much box office interest. Even so, the movie really is about being down. Consider some of the downers.

Oh, I should mention there are spoilers from here on down.

The movie opens with the little boy Carl walking with his “Spirit of Adventure” balloon, which of course is floating “up” in the air. What happens when the balloon gets stuck up on the ceiling and Carl ventures to retrieve it? He goes “down.” The balloon is lost, his arm is broken, and he marries the love of his life, Ellie.

Years later the ever-enthusiastic Ellie charges “up” a hill, Carl having a hard time keeping up. They lay on their backs and see pictures up in the clouds, including Ellie’s dream of having babies and raising a family. What happens when they go “down” the hill? Ellie is infertile. Her incredibly loving, mature, and courageous response to this sadness is one of the most profound moments later in the movie. Just in case you’re reading this before seeing it, I’m leaving out that spoiler. Suffice to say, Ellie comes down out of the clouds and lives a wonderful life.

In their old age, after never quite managing to live the adventurous life they had hoped for, Carl splurges and buys tickets for the two of them to visit “Paradise Falls” in South America. (Note: which way does a waterfall flow?) It’s called “the most beautiful place on earth.” This time Carl charges “up” the same hill where they dreamed of babies. He wants to give Ellie the tickets to the adventure on the hill where they loved to look up and dream. But this time Ellie cannot keep up. She falls and is hospitalized. The implication is that she has cancer. Ellie dies.

What of Carl’s house? For most of the movie it goes “up.” Only a few times does it even bounce on the ground. Yet there are two scenes when it reaches the ground and stays put. The first is when Carl finally gets his house where he wants it, but at the cost of sacrificing Kevin’s well-being. The house is finally down, and what does Carl get? His dream fulfilled? Nope. Instead he learns from his late wife Ellie a heart-wrenching lesson about where our dreams should be located: down to earth. The second scene where the house goes down is the final time Carl sees it. The house floats down and disappears in clouds. That is the moment when the drama of the movie has been resolved, and Carl begins his new adventure, which does not take place in the clouds.

Speaking of adventure, what about Muntz’s Zeppelin blimp, “The Spirit of Adventure”? For a lifetime Muntz took it “up” into the air on adventures. He chased dreams. But he did so selfishly, and ultimately alone. Kind of like Russell’s absentee dad, who leaves him and his mother for the dreamy adventure of an affair. I loved the final scene of the movie. “The Spirit of Adventure” has finally come down out of the clouds. It’s parked over a “boring” ice cream shop, where Russell and Carl (who is filling in for Russell’s missing dad) are just kicking it together, enjoying each other - making everyday life an adventure.

Did you catch all that? A children’s movie that addresses: infertility, aging, death, and infidelity. Wow! Pixar is back. The best storytellers around. The most courageous. The most moving stories for our times. They might just help us get our heads out of the clouds, where we dream and chase fantasies that do not become us. Now that’s down to earth.

What is it about motorcycles? The likelihood of me ever revving up a bike to find out is slim to none. That's not keeping me from devouring Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. I'm sure I'll have more to say down the road. Here, I cannot resist sharing a quote:

The simulacrum of independent thought and action that goes by the name of "creativity" trips easily off the tongues of spokespeople for the corporate counterculture, and if we're not paying attention such usage might influence our career plans. The term invokes our powerful tendency to narcissism, and in doing so greases the skids into work that is not what we had hoped.

Ooooh, this is good reading.

These days I mostly react to stress much the same way I always have: escapism. This time, though, I tried something new. I grew a beard.

It seemed like a perfectly legitimate middle-aged thing to do. It is much cheaper than buying a classic car. I do not know how to drive a motorcycle, so getting into suburban-dwelling-old-man Harley culture is out of the question, too. Yet something had to give. So I let my whiskers go.

Then I noticed the boat. Not a specific boat. Well sort of. I mean, there are a few specific boats that I have noticed. The point is that I began to notice that I, beard and all, began to notice boats.

Now quickly, in my defense, I have to say that I am one fine boat captain. Well, at least I can say that I am an impressive remote controlled amusement park tug boat captain. Get me on the rudder of one of those tugs, and I’ll navigate it through the tunnel and dock it in all the slips before the two-dollar-token fuel runs dry. The most trouble I have piloting a remote controlled tug at SeaWorld or Legoland is the inevitable snotty pre-teen boy who notices what I’m up to and takes it upon himself to ram his tug into mine. It creates more of a hassle than anything else, and sometimes I have to back my boat into a slip, bumping the little twerp’s tug away until I’m safe. I never make eye contact with those brats. Always, I let my tug do the talking.

So it’s not like I’m not cut out for open ocean travel. It is in my DNA. Sure I got seasick on a cruise ship, once. (Yes, I know Sweetheart, I remember it was on the night of the Baked Alaska.) And I puked on a deep sea fishing boat, once. That is only two times in dozens of voyages. Though, none of them have been recent. Which has got me wondering, What happened? How did it turn out that growing up fishing in the ocean on a pretty regular basis has turned into browsing used boats on Craigslist?

Is it just escapism? Maybe, despite the grandest efforts of my 100 Thing Challenge, I’ll always list mallward, blown and tossed by the dream of buying my way out of life’s discomforts. Or maybe...now I’m not trying to justify anything here, this is a genuine inquiry...maybe there has been a gaping dysfunction in my life over the past ten years that I’ve spent off the water. Landlubber or not, perhaps the 100 Thing Challenge has helped me uncover something that I’ve been missing; something that’s been blocked from my sight by all the stuff I’ve owned, and all the time I’ve spent buying it.

It is probably more complicated than that. Ever been on a deep sea fishing boat? Yeah, not exactly a zen-like crowd of life-happy humans. Even so, I’m not willing to write off this recurring boat theme so easily this time. Not as easily as I dismissed the beard, anyway. It’s trimmed into a five o’clock shadow that will, soon enough, get shaved.

Perhaps I should start all over.