After Six Years of Teaching Everyone Else to Relax, I Finally Taught Nothing

My name is Yang Su (alias), I'm thirty-seven, and I have taught surfing at Venice Beach for six years. Up at five forty to read the swell report, then footstraps and board wax for a line of students; the sentence I shout most is: don't fight the wave, drop your shoulders. Honestly? I have never once done it myself. There is sand permanently in my car and in my hair; my left shoulder, clipped by a board the year before last, aches on grey days. And the note in my phone that says 'Thursday: must rest' has sat there three months — never deleted, never obeyed.

This is not a walk-in place: you apply, you are reviewed, the places are few. I waited until I had half forgotten, and then the confirmation arrived, the address sent to my phone alone, never posted anywhere. That day I had just finished three lessons and the zipper of my wetsuit had taken two hairs with it; I sat in the car five minutes before I could get out, hands shaking a little, which embarrassed me. The door ritual settled me before anything else: slippers already at my feet, my sandy shoes taken away, warm tea placed in my hands. I changed without doing a thing; the bath was attended throughout, the water tested for me first. I — the woman who spends her days shouting at other people to relax — stood in warm water with nothing whatsoever to say, and simply let myself be looked after. My first question was still pure coach: so, how does the session run? I laughed at myself the moment it was out.

Before we began I put the ugly terms up front: do not touch the left shoulder at all unless you ask me first; slowly; when I say stop, we stop, and nobody explains to me why we are stopping. Every point was agreed, one by one, and the scent was mine to choose — I took the lightest one there was, almost nothing. Years by the sea make a nose particular. Warmth arrived first at my scalp, like noon seawater slipping over the crown of my head. Then the warm, silky Nuru liquid covered my shoulders and back — gliding, close — sliding down my waist and arms, all the way to feet that know every reef and my toes. With the warm towel at the back of my neck I was still timetabling tomorrow: when the tide turns, which student is afraid of the water. Timetabled, and timetabled — and then, suddenly, I couldn't anymore.

There was one unglamorous moment in the middle. As a palm settled steadily under my shoulder blade, my nose stung and the tears simply came, no warning at all. I babbled 'it's fine, it's fine — occupational hazard', trying to paper it over. Nobody took up my line, and nobody stopped to comfort me either; the rhythm just grew slower, slow enough that I no longer needed to speak. That was when I understood my own sentence at last — 'give your weight to the water'. Lying still and doing nothing is harder than standing on a wave. When the whole line had been travelled, scalp to toes, I felt like someone the sea had held up, whole, for once — not one inch of me still straining against anything.

The last passage was the Yoni private care — the one I had acted most casual about and looked forward to most. I teach people to go into the water; I have seen every scene there is. Yet when it was my turn to be tended that ceremoniously, the shyness reddened my ears before anything else did. The terms were mine: stoppable at any moment, every approach announced first. As warmth and patience opened me slowly, I understood: being cherished steadily is the same thing as being held up on a wave — you only have to hand your weight over, and you will not sink. For those minutes I was not a coach, not the voice through a megaphone. I was a woman, cherished whole, steady enough to sigh.

When it ended the sky was not yet dark. Nobody hurried me: a hot towel over my face, warm water finished, and at the door I put my slippers on the wrong feet, left for right, and laughed out loud at myself. Driving home past the beach, the waves still came in one after another, and I found I did not want to add a single class. Next small-swell Thursday, I am teaching nobody how to relax. That day is empty, and it is mine to lie in. I asked the travelling ritual out in full, too: the week I run surf camp down in San Diego, I want this same feeling of being held booked into the room by the sea.

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