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I always dreamed of living by the sea. Growing up in the city of Kuala Lumpur (or KL, as we call it), our day-to-day interactions with bodies of water were mostly limited to swimming classes in school or weekend trips to the local country club. But every school holiday, we would drive up the east coast of Malaysia and park ourselves on a beach in Terengganu, burying each other in the sand and frolicking in gentle waves. Many of my fondest memories from childhood were made there, and I’d return to school with burnt skin and sun-bleached hair, eager to show off these embodied souvenirs of a holiday well-spent.
As we grew older and began spending more of our holidays abroad, we still found ourselves gravitating towards the sea. On a big summer trip to California, I remember my sister and I racing into the water at Manhattan Beach minutes before heading to the airport, with no time to shower before the flight, marinating in salt for the entire 20-hour journey home.
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As a result of these holidays, I came to associate the sea with a sense of freedom, a slower pace, and a laissez-faire approach to life. Everyone seemed happier by the sea, and I was no exception. It was the setting in which I felt most at home. That is, until Guy and I found ourselves caught in a rip current, diving under big sets with no surfboard, fighting our way back to shore off the Pacific coast of Mexico.
I was 26 and had been living in a string of coastal towns by then, acclimatising to the cold waters of Brighton, England, and navigating rougher seas in Ericeira, Portugal. I considered myself a competent swimmer, well-acquainted with the fickleness of the ocean, which is perhaps why I felt especially shaken, ashamed even, to have found myself in such a dicey situation.
There was a sense of betrayal that accompanied the fear. After a lifetime of swimming in the wild sea, feeling most at home in her waters, I felt I was suddenly no longer welcome. I had experienced the immense power of Mother Nature, and recognised, in that moment, my own comparative insignificance. She could wipe me off the face of the Earth, and it would continue turning, unchanged.
The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure. — William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
I got back in the water soon after that day, determined not to let it defeat me. But the wildness of the ocean had extinguished, somewhat, the wildness in me. I entered the water with a trepidation I had not had before, and a hypervigilance that I carry with me to this day. Though I’ve continued to live by the sea, swimming, surfing, diving, I’ve never fully recovered the feeling of being at home in her arms. But lately, I’m realising that maybe that’s okay.
There is something of a colonial mindset in feeling the need to overpower the natural world — to conquer the Earth and tame her for our comfort and personal gain. The oceans do not exist for my comfort. They are vast, mighty bodies, home to billions and the source of all life on Earth. To feel fear as I enter her waters is to respect her immensity and to recognise my own smallness in the grand scheme of it all. I am merely a guest on this Earth, here for only a blink of her eye.
Perhaps, to have felt the strength of Mother Nature that day was not a betrayal, but a revelation — an insight. And the smallness I mistook for insignificance is rather a recognition that I am part of something so much bigger than myself.
With love,
