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Below the surface

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This is a chapter from my eleventh book called Quotation Marks Sparks.

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"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
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I was looking at quotes that hit hard and this quote stood out to me. It seems mundane and obvious and often repeated. Life is about how we respond to the inevitable. It is not what happens to us but how we respond. I had to ask myself to dig deeper and look below the surface. Then I saw that when we surf we really become the waves. We become friends with the waves. The waves and us are the same. Further, the waves are created by us and in our heads. We can control the waves because who can surf all the time? Sometimes we just have to come to shore and build sand castles on shore.

I asked my friend Gemini for feedback and he said that I was right, the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote initially seems like a simple call for resilience, but my deeper dive reveals profound layers. The idea that we can move beyond merely reacting to life's "waves" and actually *become* them, fostering a sense of connection and even control, is a powerful expansion of the metaphor. My point about the waves being internal and our ability to choose when to "surf" and when to "build sandcastles" adds a crucial dimension of agency and self-awareness to navigating life's inevitable ups and downs.

Light is a wave. Sound is a wave. Everything is made up of waves. We are one with the universe. We do not merely exist in the universe. We are the universe. Everything is connected. The waves affect us but we also affect the waves. Science says that the very atoms that make up our bodies were forged in stars. We are, in a very real sense, stardust. In a sense we are dissolving the boundary between observer and observed. If I take the word spark from the name of this book and combine it with the word surface, I get space. Deep space. I have focused on what exists below the surface rather than on the surface but there is also what exists beyond the surface. This life is just an illusion and we are just being tested for the next life – the final wave.
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