I am not creative.

Over my lifetime, I’ve repeated those four words quietly to myself and verbally to others hundreds if not thousands of times. My internal and external identity has been defined by being a left-brained, highly analytical thinker. I’ve earned degrees and made good money off this identity, so it’s never been something I’ve questioned. How easy it has been to fall back on those words whenever I’m challenged with a problem that doesn’t have a definite solution, or a set of optimal outcomes.

However, my current free-flowing lifestyle has allowed me to break down my established identity in a number of ways. Above all else, I’ve been striving to cultivate a clear mind. Mental clarity is the new primary metric I’ve been using to structure my time during this experimental phase. The flexibility of traveling has provided opportunities every day to choose places to go, things to do, people to meet, and food to eat which can increase my ability to see my own mind and the world around me through a clearer lens.

This extra polished lens has led to a number of insights, but there’s one in particular which took me by surprise: it’s possible for me to be creative. While it certainly doesn’t come easily, I’ve found that if I fiddle with some variables to get my mind into just the right place, I can unleash a flood of ideas which at the very least sound good in my head. Now it’s time to see if I can bring them from the ethereal mental matrix to the external world in a way that resonates.

And so, I’ve decided I might write a book.

FAQ

How have you been “polishing” your mental lens to see things more clearly?

The simple answer is meditation, yoga, breathwork, and surfing, which I’ve been practicing on a near daily basis for the past couple months. When combined with a bit of elbow grease, they have proven to be effective cleaning products for wiping the continuously accumulating grime off my mental lens.

But it goes beyond that, as there is a delightful positive feedback loop which occurs when you’re cleaning lenses. As your mental lens gets cleaner, your sight improves, and you begin to see more clearly what factors around you are coating and distorting the lens in the first place. For example, an acquaintance who is spitting on the lens all the time, or a job or hobby you thought was enriching, but is actually just constantly kicking up dust which sticks all over the lens and is hard to scrape off.

Now, to live in the modern world, you have to get a little dirty. The idea is not to intensely scrub the lens until it’s spotless, then lock yourself in a sterile, empty room where nothing can make it dirty again, because that just means escaping from reality. But if you understand the regular care instructions for keeping your mental lens decently clean, then use the improved vision to make smarter decisions in the way you navigate the world, life tends to flow more smoothly.

What is the book going to be about?

Lens cleaning…

…kind of.

Actually the book is going to be mostly about the two lens cleaners which constantly amaze me with their sanitization power, especially when combined: surfing and meditation.

In order to engage people and make it educational at the same time, I intend to share my journey over the past few years delving deep into these two activities, and highlight the multitude of lessons they’ve taught me about how to live. I plan on structuring it as a series of vignettes (such as this one) interspersed with what I took away from each experience.

Why write about surfing and not just meditation?

Within the last few months, I’ve realized that wherever I take my life next, surfing is going to be involved. So I may as well blend the two things I’m most passionate about into one, and express my genuine thoughts on how surfing and meditation can force multiply each other.

Also, meditation has become the Windex of mental lens cleaners in recent years (mostly due to how well it actually works). I don’t have statistics on how many books on meditation have been released by Western authors in the past few decades, but the number isn’t small. On the other hand, the genre of surf literature is much more ripe for opportunity.

Where are you going to write your book?

This morning, as my eyelids slowly pulled themselves upwards and the light began to reflect off my retinas, I was greeted by the sight of a distant white line of foam directly above my big toe, spreading its way across my smaller toes before disappearing behind my foot.

Rising slowly from the thin cotton sheets and into the humid air surrounding me, I planted my feet firmly on the cool tile floor and began bouncing my heels up and down to warm up my bodily systems. Several minutes later, still half asleep, I fell into a mild trance listening to the rhythmic scraping being produced by my hand as it swept back and forth across my board, fragrant wax pressed into my palm.

Then two flights of stairs and a handful of bare footed steps had me straight on the beach, board loosely tucked under arm, gaze fixed out at the pre-dawn indigo water speckled with constantly shifting patterns of white. Planting my feet once again, this time on small broken bits of coral, I gave a quick offering of gratitude to the ocean, for providing me with yet another opportunity to immerse myself in its splendor.

As I now type these sentences on my tiny laptop, I’m sitting back in my simple, Wifi-less apartment, balcony windows thrust open, and a mild onshore sea breeze tickling my bare-chested figure. To my right is a mug of almost-cool-enough-to-drink local Ceylon tea, and to my left is a carefully made ripe papaya stuffed with fresh buffalo curd infused with coconut treacle, and topped with a variety of fruits purchased from the palm leaf covered fruit stand down the road.

The poignant smell of sandalwood incense intermixed with steaming breakfast curry drifts lazily around the room, and I can barely make out the sound of my surf-crazed French pastry chef neighbor strumming his guitar. Surveying the waves beneath my idyllic roost, I can’t help but picture myself on each shimmering blue face as it rears up and tumbles down with a frothy fervor.

When the wind dies down later today, I’ll almost certainly return to my watery oasis for more purposeful play, and a front row seat to the inevitably beautiful color-soaked sunset. But for now, I’ll be content to sit and watch from above, while letting my fingers dance across the laptop keyboard in an attempt to turn abstract thought into tangible words.

—

Translation: I’ve rented my own apartment on the south coast of Sri Lanka overlooking my favorite surf break and down the road from a small Buddhist temple inhabited by a friendly local monk, and plan to spend the next month (at least) taking full advantage of the dream-like setting to get a solid start on the book.

The only other activities I plan to engage in are surfing (for research purposes only, of course), and the occasional teaching of a yoga or meditation class.

What happened to opening a meditation retreat center?

The main reason I want to open a meditation center is because the thing that gets me most excited in life is creating useful learning experiences for people (apparently it doesn’t take others long to pick up on this, as less than two weeks into staying in a hostel recently I earned the nickname “The Professor”). A book is merely a different way to do this.

That being said, I still very much intend to open a retreat center of some sorts one day. If anything, I see this book as a step in that direction, as it will allow me to further crystallizing my thoughts on material directly relevant to what I believe should be taught at the center.

Additionally, learning how to structure my days to get into the state of focus, clarity, and creativity necessary to produce satisfying writing is going to be an educational exercise in itself. I’m sure I will learn all sorts of things which I can apply to my teachings.

I still plan to continue in-person teaching while writing and traveling. I even have a new fancy web page advertising my services.

Why are you saying you might write a book?

Because writing books is really hard. At least it seems that way even though I’ve never tried it. Actually, I wrote 80 pages of a fantasy novel when I was 12 years old, but I’m not really counting that…

Anyway, I want to use vague language for now so I can back out if I need to without being completely disgraced. As with everything in my life at the moment, this is an experiment, and I want to feel it out without committing myself in a huge way.

How do I keep up to date with your progress?

If you’re receiving this via email, then you’re already subscribed, and will get the updates. Otherwise, just subscribe to my email list, and I’ll be sending out snippets of writing as I go.

Does this mean we won’t get posts about you on other subjects for a while?

Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.