Alan Watts on the Ocean: His Best Quotes for Surfers

Few thinkers speak to surfers quite like Alan Watts. Again and again he reached for the ocean to explain who we are and how we fit into the whole, and if you've ever sat out the back watching a set build and fade, his words tend to land differently than they might on dry land.

Watts had a gift for explaining the mysteries of the universe with a practical simplicity and humour that defies the scale of the concepts he presents. Instead of preaching a religion or doctrine, he drew insights from Zen, Hinduism, and even Christianity, broaching the big questions with grace and kindness. The ocean was his favourite tool for it: a metaphor for the underlying unity of the universe and the interconnectedness of all things.

So we've paired some of his quotes with a few images from another sunny Saturday at the beach. The bees were buzzing and the dune flowers open wide. Waves were spilling, building and reforming. It was one of those days that reminds you to appreciate what surfers can too easily take for granted.

Watts is no longer with us in body. But his words ripple outwards, resonating every time someone reads them. So enjoy.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”

There is an interdependence of flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected! And so the many many patterns of interconnections lock it in together into a unity, which is, however, much too complicated for us to think about.

There's no grand conclusion here, and Watts probably wouldn't want one. Read the quotes, paddle out, and let them do their work in their own time. If they resonate, you might also enjoy asking whether surfing is a form of meditation, or sitting with a few more quotes about surfing on your next flat day.