Paddling out amid the crashing waves of midlife—and lost opportunity.
By Sarah Gold
The hardest part about middle age is the regret. When you suddenly, alarmingly recognize that your life is half over, you realize that, not only will you no longer have the chance to do everything you’d planned, but you’ve missed opportunities. The choices you might have made but didn’t—those are what really keep you up at night.
I speak from experience. At 41, I have an enviable life: a job most people would trade a limb for; a warm, intelligent husband whose company I never tire of; a lively menagerie of family and friends; and a galumphy dog that makes me laugh several times a day. But even my charmed existence can’t keep me from, at times, succumbing to the demons of “what if.”
Most of the regrets that haunt me in these moments are lost possibilities that I’ll never recover. There’s the phone message from the literary agent that I never returned, the dear friend I never properly cherished before his suicide, and the years—decades—of easy fertility, when I could have conceived a child if only I’d made it a priority.
But there has always been one “what if.” A small but surprisingly persistent one—that I’ve imagined may not be too late to remedy. What if, after all this time, I could still learn to surf?
My childhood offered me innumerable occasions to try. I am the progeny of two ocean lovers: an Australian mother whose greatest pleasure was to stroke gracefully past the breakers of our hometown beaches in Sydney, and an American father who’d spent his youth as a lifeguard and swimming instructor. They had me bobbing in the waves at Bondi and Manly before I could speak or walk. By 8 years old, I was bodysurfing and swimming competitively (and watching local boys catch rollers on their boards). Even after we moved to Connecticut when I was 13, I palled around with kids who wrangled whatever they could out of the meager surf of Long Island Sound. Male kids, that is.
See, in the 1970s and ’80s, girls—at least the ones I knew—didn’t surf. And so, very simply, neither did I. It wasn’t as if I’d given it a shot and was rebuked, or even that I’d asked to try and was made fun of. The distressing truth is that attempting it never even crossed my mind.
But what if it had?
This question continued to plague me as I grew older and watched women’s surfing become a sport in its own right. I couldn’t stop thinking that, with all my water skills, my attitude may have been all that kept me from becoming another world champion… another Layne Beachley. Instead, though, here I was, paddling through midlife, feeling like I’d missed the wave.
Although it did occur to me, often, that that’s the thing about waves: There are always more of them.
It was this rationale that landed me on a crescent-shaped beach in northern Kauai on a recent early morning, as the sun (and my 42nd birthday) edged up on the horizon. The mixed reactions of my loved ones ran the gamut from “You go, girl!” to “Please don’t brain yourself on a coral reef.” But despite the mixed bag, I signed up for a small women’s surf camp fittingly called Surf n Sol.
Nervous as I felt, I should’ve been listening carefully to the instructions that our teacher, Mike, was giving to the three of us in the camp. But my eyes kept darting away from his pop-up demonstrations and over to my fellow students, both of whom were significantly younger and fresher looking than me. And as I gazed out to the gentle swells of the bay, I could see small figures nimbly balancing on surfboards—children, some of whom couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old. It was only the first day, but already a new “what if” had taken root in my mind: What if this was a huge mistake? Or a spectacularly effective way to embarrass myself?
When the moment of reckoning came, Mike helped me paddle out to a spot where the waves were cresting. Although I’d trained at the gym for weeks, my heart rattled unevenly in my chest as I pawed my way through the surf. I wanted this so badly. And yet I could so easily see myself failing.
My anxiety escaped Mike, who paddled alongside me and said, “You seem pretty at home in the water.”
Close to tears, I twisted on the board to look at him. “Listen, I know I’m old, and I don’t have high expectations,” I said. “All I want is to stand up once. Just once. I don’t care if it takes me the entire week.”
Mike laughed. “All week? You’re going to be standing in five minutes. Now here comes a good wave. Go for it, paddle! Paddle!”
An hour later, when I finally dragged my board out of the sea, I felt like I’d been born all over again. It happened just as Mike had predicted: I got up and actually surfed on my very first try. I had salt in my eyes, sand in my hair, terrifically sore shoulders, and bruises on the tops of my feet and in my armpits—places where they don’t come easy.
But I had no regrets. Nor did I have an easy answer to the new question starting to nag at me: What if our doubts are the only things holding us back?
