UNCODE.initRow(document.getElementById("script-174202"));“Surfing became my everything… my religion, my peace of mind, my ego checker,… my happiness meter, … it’s really everything for me. But that doesn’t mean that I’m like a surf rat and I’m only hanging at the beach all day, it’s just, the surfing frame of mind extends outside of the actual act of surfing.”
Andrea Kabwasa
Transcript
Interview Date: June 2016
My name is Maia Dery. This interview with longboard surfer Andrea Kabwasa is the first in a series called Waves to Wisdom. The project is a simple one. I seek out people I admire, surfers with what look to me to be ocean centered wisdom practices, ask them if they’d be willing to share a surf session or two, and then, after we ride some waves together, talk to me about their oceanic habits, surfing, work, love, meaning, and anything else that comes up. Andrea was generous enough to agree to two surf sessions in Malibu, the Eden of modern surfing if ever there was one. The sessions we shared were a little bit terrifying but magical. The interview was even better. Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Andrea: My name’s Andrea Kabwasa and I’m 47 and I’ve been surfing, I dunno, about, I dunno, what is that about 15, 14, 15 years or something like that.
Maia: And we are in Malibu right next to the beach and we surfed this morning a building swell, [mm hm] pretty exciting [laugh] and uh I don’t have a lot of experience with big crowds and it was unsurprisingly [yeah] well populated. Beautiful wave– you’ve been surfing Malibu for most of your time as a surfer or did it take you a few years to get there?
Andrea: Yeah I been surfing there maybe about 12,12 or 13 years yeah quite a while.
Maia: How long did it take you to get comfortable with the crowd?
Andrea: Oh, I accepted it right off the bat.
Maia: Right away okay [LAUGH]. So you were a full grown adult when you started surfing?
Andrea: Yes I was.
Maia: What, what led you take it up?
Andrea: It was something I thought about when I was a child and I remember watching surfers. My aunt, my aunt used to take us to the beach and I would see the surfers. And I do remember saying I want to do that one day. So you know fast-forward through life, and all kinds of stuff and I had one of these epiphanies kinds of deals where I questioned what I wanted to do. Realized I could do anything I wanted, what did I want to do and I went to sleep and then when I woke up, surfing came to mind.
Maia: As Andrea shared her story with me, of course, I couldn’t help look for overlap in our oceanic autobiographies. Like me she’d had a childhood desire, made her living in that moment as a teacher, and had a story whose plot was woven of the warp of loss and weft of waves. It was my 40th birthday had prompted me to finally get a board in the water. Now, ten years later, I was somewhere in the process of dealing with my own loss, my first really, truly, devastatingly broken heart. It was the end of an ill-advised love that had turned out, inevitably, to not be what I’d wished it was. An obvious failure to see clearly. But now I could do almost anything I wanted and what I wanted was, among other things, to surf with and listen well to Andrea. And to bring what I knew would be wise words to someone else who might need them more than I did.
Andrea: I got up and went surfing. I told my mom I was going to go surfing cause I was living with my mom then and she basically said, “ Go! That’s great!” [Beautiful] So, that helped a lot [ok] cause if she would’ve said, “Ah, don’t do that don’t waste your time, I probably wouldn’t have done it. But um her initial instinctual positive reaction was like “Oh, ok yeah I’m gonna do that then.”
Maia: Good MOM! And so did you take a lesson?
Andrea: Yeah, I took a lesson and uh, yeah, fell in love right away.