The stoke is real...

NOT Hawaii.  This footage is from Black's Beach, in Southern California, during the January 2021 epic swell.  

After nearly passing out from heat exhaustion the day before yesterday, I've been thinking about life a bit more than usual, which is a lot.  Thinking about the best parts of life, I had this random thought at 4am this morning, when it was still about 80 degrees outside.

The Stoke is real, everything else is bullshit.

The colonists that landed in Hawaii in the 1800's tried to stop the indigenous islanders from surfing.  It nearly worked, there were very few people left surfing in Hawaii in the last half of the 1800's.  Around 1900, a half-Irish half-Hawaiian in Waikiki, named George Freeth, along with a few other guys, notably the younger Duke Kahanamoku, brought the ancient sport of kings back.  Around 1907, well known writer Jack London, the same guy best known for writing the novels White Fang and The Call of the Wild, wrote a travel article for a women's magazine about the Waikiki surfers.  

In the next few years George, and then Duke, both traveled to California, to demonstrate their skills as swimmers, divers, and surfers.  That was the beginning of surfing in California, and Duke later took it around the world, setting the stage for the wave of action sports from the 1960's into the 2000's, where skiing, motocross, big wall climbing, water skiing, skateboarding, BMX, sport climbing, Boogie boarding, snowboarding, bouldering, mountain biking, inline skating, wakeboarding, kite surfing, and several variations of skydiving, among other new sports, blew up and went global.  Yeah, you could call the last 50 years the Rise of Stoke.  

These sports often weren't dropped when people hit 22 years old and left college.  Many people do one of these sports, or another, in their 60's, 70's, and even 80's for a few surfers, I think.  While contests, trophies, championships, and the notion of "winning" is part of all of these sports, they are all done by most participants just for the pure stoke of the act itself.  This sets them apart from the traditional team sports, like soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.  

There's also a creative apsect to all of these sports, and a personal reward, often called stoke, that comes whether the move is done in front of friends, in a contest, videotaped, or done all alone, with no one else around.  It's that moment of stoke when first landing a new trick, riding that epic wave, or stomping a move perfectly, that is something like the creative high artists or musicians get.  Much to the dismay of traditionally oriented people around them, action sports enthusiasts often reorganize their lives around these sports.  Traditional goals and achievments often lose meaning in this world.  A lot of people just don't understand that.  But the draw of pure stoke is growing, as these sports keep growing, and spreading, to the far corners of the Earth.  

What is life all about?  Here's my favorite quote from the late comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose ideas inspired George Lucas when writing Star Wars, and who actually learned to surf from none other than Duke Kahanmoku himself.  

"People say what we're seeking is a meaning of life, I don't think that's what we're really seeking.  I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive."  

-Joseph Campbell, in the Power of Myth interview by Bill Moyers

So that's what was going through my head, when I woke up at 4 am this morning.  What can I say, weird stuff wanders through my head in the middle of the night.  For about 19 years, life has pushed me away form action sports.  My stoke over this period has come mostly creative work, like blogging, my Sharpie scribblestyle artwork, and wandering around the streets shooting photos of whatever seems interesting.  But the more life pushed me away from BMX freestyle, the more I want to go ride.