Living an Authentic Life: Swimming Through the Waves.
For years, I felt as though living my life meant swimming underneath the waves.
Submerged.
Holding my breath.
Aware that there was a storm above me, but protected from it by being beneath the surface.
It wasn’t drowning.
But it wasn’t really living either.
It was survival dressed up as safety.
I could imagine almost anything down there. I could rehearse conversations before they happened, replay conversations that already had, anticipate problems that might never arrive, and construct entire futures inside my head.
My imagination gave me somewhere to go when reality felt uncomfortable.
It also gave me somewhere to hide.
Now I’m beginning to feel as though I’m swimming through the waves.
It’s messier.
The water pushes me around. Sometimes it knocks me off balance. Sometimes I swallow water.
It’s more tiring than hiding underneath.
But I’m moving with life rather than beneath it.
I’m participating rather than watching.
And perhaps, in time, I’ll learn to surf.
Not fight the water.
Not hide from it.
Use its energy.
Balance. Skill. Trust.
I’ll fall sometimes.
But falling is part of the sport.
The Illusion of the Submerged Life
There is something strangely seductive about living beneath the surface.
You are protected from some of the turbulence.
But you are also separated from the light.
Imagination can become both refuge and prison.
We fantasise. We catastrophise. We rehearse conversations that will never happen. We regret conversations that already did.
We construct explanations.
We construct futures.
Sometimes we even construct versions of ourselves that are easier to live with than the person standing in front of the mirror.
None of this means imagination is the enemy.
Far from it.
Imagination is one of the things that makes us human.
It allows us to create, explore, understand and connect things that aren’t immediately visible.
But the same imagination that can help us create a better future can also keep us permanently rehearsing one.
There is a difference between using imagination to explore life and using it to avoid experiencing life.
I think I spent quite a while confusing the two.
Feeling Comes First
I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens before a thought becomes a thought.
Before the explanation.
Before the story.
Before we find words for what we’re experiencing, there can be something much simpler:
A sensation.
A feeling.
A shift in the body.
A sense that something is happening before we quite know what it is.
Perhaps this is why feelings can be such powerful fuel for imagination.
The same raw feeling that becomes anxiety in one moment might become art, insight or connection in another.
The feeling itself may simply be information.
What we do with it is another matter.
That distinction matters.
Because being responsible for our experience doesn’t mean being responsible for everything that happens to us.
Life will continue to throw waves at us.
Other people will disappoint us.
Things will happen that we didn’t choose.
We don’t control the ocean.
But we can become more curious about how we respond to the waves.
And perhaps that is where some of our freedom lives.
We Are Not Separate
There is another idea I keep returning to.
Perhaps, when we break things down far enough, the boundaries between things aren’t quite as solid as they appear.
Physics gives us a universe in which matter and energy are deeply interconnected. Philosophy has spent thousands of years questioning where the boundaries of the individual actually lie.
I don’t pretend to have the answer.
But I find the possibility fascinating.
Perhaps separation is not quite as absolute as it feels.
Every person we encounter changes us in some small way.
A sentence someone said twenty years ago can still influence a decision today.
A kindness can travel further than the person who offered it ever knows.
A wound can be carried forward.
So can wisdom.
We are, in part, composites of everyone we’ve known.
It reminds me of the Founders in Deep Space Nine, who could move between solid, liquid and gaseous forms.
Perhaps humanity is less fixed than we imagine.
We spend so much time thinking of ourselves as separate, permanent things when we may actually be temporary forms within something much larger.
Whether that is literally true or simply a useful way of looking at existence, I don’t know.
But it makes me wonder.
And sometimes a good question is more useful than a premature answer.
Calm Becomes Chaos If We Stop Paying Attention
I’ve also noticed something in my own experience.
Calm can disappear surprisingly quickly when attention disappears with it.
A quiet moment can become a stream of thoughts.
A peaceful morning can become an argument with someone who isn’t even there.
A perfectly ordinary afternoon can suddenly become an examination of everything that might go wrong tomorrow.
The world hasn’t necessarily changed.
My attention has.
Perhaps this is why observation matters.
Not detached observation.
Not standing outside your life and analysing it until you no longer experience it.
Something more curious than that.
Notice the thought.
Notice the feeling.
Notice the story you’re telling yourself.
Notice the inherited script.
Notice the impulse.
And perhaps, just for a moment, don’t immediately obey it.
Observation creates a little space between experiencing something and becoming it.
That space can be surprisingly valuable.
The Simple Truth
I’m a simple man with simple needs and a desire to see the world in as simple a way as possible.
But simplicity isn’t the same as simplistic thinking.
Simplistic thinking removes complexity because it doesn’t know what to do with it.
Simplicity looks through complexity and tries to find the pattern underneath.
And the pattern I’m beginning to see is something like this:
We may not be separate selves having experiences as much as we are experiences, histories, relationships and possibilities temporarily becoming aware of themselves.
That isn’t a scientific conclusion.
It’s simply a way of looking.
A question rather than an answer.
The wave knows it will eventually return to the ocean.
But it still rises.
Perhaps that is enough.
What It Means to Live Authentically
Perhaps living authentically isn’t about discovering some perfect version of yourself.
Perhaps there isn’t one.
Perhaps it is more about becoming increasingly willing to inhabit the life you actually have.
To honour the form you’ve taken, even knowing it is temporary.
To feel what you feel without assuming every feeling deserves to become a command.
To observe yourself without using observation as another form of escape.
To acknowledge what you’ve inherited—your history, instincts, habits and conditioning—without assuming that everything inherited must also be continued.
To appreciate the life you’re living rather than constantly comparing it with the life you imagined you would have.
And perhaps most importantly:
To participate.
Not perfectly.
Not fearlessly.
Just honestly.
Swimming Through the Waves
The path isn’t linear.
Some days you’ll feel as though you’re surfing.
The next day you’ll be underneath the water again.
That isn’t necessarily failure.
That’s the ocean.
There will be days when you lose your balance.
Days when old habits return.
Days when imagination becomes refuge again.
Days when the waves are simply too big to surf.
The goal, perhaps, isn’t to become someone who never gets knocked under.
It’s to become someone who trusts that they can come back up.
To breathe.
To look around.
To feel the water.
And when the next wave arrives, to decide what to do with it.
I’m still learning.
For a long time, I thought authenticity meant escaping the waves.
Now I’m beginning to think it might mean something else.
Perhaps it means no longer needing to hide beneath them.
First, you swim.
Then, perhaps, you learn to surf.
And eventually you realise something you couldn’t see while you were hiding underneath:
The wave doesn’t fight the ocean.
It rises from it.
