For those brief seconds, I was tabula rasa.

For those brief seconds, I was tabula rasa. The wave broke overhead and started to make that pipeline that everyone, whether they’ve surfed or not, recognizes. The water started to pick up speed and I was crouching down with my hand touching the face of the wave trying not get sucked up into it. Then it landed right behind me, shooting all that air forward like a giant cannon. The force of it lifted me up off the board and the spray rushed in front of me, totally obscuring any possible sight.

It was in those seconds, hurling at speeds faster than any roller-coaster through an impenetrable wall of white mist, that I felt it. I felt that switch in my brain get flipped. Nothing else existed. Not even a survival instinct. That other either eighty percent of my brain that’s usually locked away was freed and I could do anything. Anything at all. It was all possible. All of it. Flight. Time Travel. Other worlds. All I had to do was think of it.

Then the wall of mist broke and I shot out the end of the pipeline. Sunlight flooded back into my eyes and I rode out of harms way. Minutes later I sat on my board and the common everyday thoughts of the world flooded back. That mystical eighty percent returned to its cell and went back to sleep. The waves carried me back to shore. I was the same again. The same except with a memory of who I’d been and what I could do. A memory of a person who was and could be again, whenever that perfect wave comes along.