In the process of helping a friend write an essay about Save Trestles. I’ve stumbled upon some journal articles entitled the “Science of Surfing.” They’re coastal research essays that aim to “create a common language” that will “bridge the gap between the colloquial slang of surfers and the technical language of the scientists and and policy makers.” Another paper aims to “dispel the traditional sterotypes of surfers” by arguing that surfers today are “highly affluent, fully employed, well educated coastal visitors who visit Trestles only to surf.” Ah, the new bourgeois!
In the Methods section, this paper mentions the following:
“We determined that surfers have difficulty accurately remembering their specific surf behavior more than two weeks prior to the survey date. After two weeks surfers tend to only remember the average number of visits per month.”
This is just too funny!
Sources: “The Science of Surfing Waves and Surf Breaks - A Review” (Scarfe, B.E., 2003)
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain, but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
— John Cheever
Keeping your fingers crossed makes it difficult to hold a pen, but I must say, it’s worth it.
It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.
J Krishnamurti used the word meditation to mean something entirely different from the practice of any system or method to control the mind. He said, “Man, in order to escape his conflicts, has invented many forms of meditation. These have been based on desire, will, and the urge for achievement, and imply conflict and a struggle to arrive. This conscious, deliberate striving is always within the limits of a conditioned mind, and in this there is no freedom. All effort to meditate is the denial of meditation. Meditation is the ending of thought. It is only then that there is a different dimension which is beyond time.”
For Krishnamurti, meditation was choiceless awareness in the present. He said “..When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy - if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation.”
“Meditation means ‘To be free of measurement’.”
“Meditation can only take place when there is no effort, when there is no contradiction”.
