Today, my co-worker and friend, Summer, sent me a link to her blog. She and I are writers, as are a couple of others in the office. After all, I work in the Office of Communications so the fact that we are all writers make sense. Summer and I have discussed writing on several occasions. We do it all the time. We write at work, we write at home, we write in our minds as we go to sleep at night and we write while we do all of the other activities that we’ve chosen to make a part of our lives. We’re both aspiring novelists, but we end up writing poetry, short stories, work stuff, post-it notes, etc....everything but the novel we’ve aspired to write. I can’t speak for Summer, but I also write e-mails to people just like I wrote letters as a kid to various pen pals and family members. We were both talking about blogs a while back and she shared her blog with me: www.summercampfire.blogspot.com. Although her blog is about yoga and mine is about a surfing, they are surprisingly similar in ideas. We have completely different writing styles, but the message in her latest piece was similar to past messages in my own blog. Her blog was about persevering. I don’t want to ruin the surprise if you should decide to read it (which you should), but basically, Summer talked about concentration, commitment and suffering. All three of these abstractions definitely relate to many things in life, including surfing. Just as Summer had to decide about her yoga pose, as a surfer I have to concentrate on my actions in the water, commit to a wave and, sometimes, endure suffering (okay, this last part, more times than I care to admit).
“There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permits. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”
Art Turock* (motivational speaker)
* Not really sure about Art Turock, but I read this quote a while ago and really liked it.
