Editor's Note: This is the second installment of an ongoing series illuminating a number of pearls of wisdom from the great Gerry Lopez.
“You’re trying to find the balance, the Dao, the middle ground, and you have to deal with both sides,” says Gerry Lopez on finding his equilibrium in and out of the water. “Even though you may find that Dao, the center, when you move away from it is when you take on the aspects of the yin or yang”—”dark” or “light” energy, respectively, in Chinese philosophy. “It’s something that takes a lifetime first to even see and be aware of, and then to hopefully come to some kind of understanding of how that’s affecting you. It’s taken me a lot of years. And I’m still learning, all the time.”
And sometimes that learning has involved shaking things up. Far be it from Mr. Pipeline to point a wavering finger in the “right” direction, but for him, it certainly wasn’t higher education.
“I graduated from high school in 1966. Every single person in my graduating class was going to college. I remember a friend who graduated the year before. We were all into surfing but surfing was different then. It was just more for recreation. I remember he was going to the University of Hawaii, and he lived right up the street from the high school, and in the morning…he’d be driving by to go surfing and he’d give us the finger as he went by. We’d be going, ‘ man, I want to be able to do that .’”
Lopez had a pleasant enough tryst with California during a couple of semesters at a small, private liberal arts school in the late 1960s—a great time and place to have been, he concedes—but “I never really thought that much about why I went to that school. I know once I got there, I went, ‘ man, I don’t really fit here .’” It wasn’t for him, and he booked it back to Hawaii, where he began shaping, and before long he was off to the races with rail design and, ultimately, redefining the lines one could draw atop an aquatic vessel.
A repetend in our conversation was “live and learn,” which on the surface is trite, sure. But life has been nothing if not a trial by fire for Lopez, and he credits his oft-hard-won wisdom to it. Those who ask questions, he puts forth, will find answers. But if you’re to get anywhere, one has got to ask of themself the primary question “What do you want out of this life? Yoga,” he tells me in no uncertain terms, “gave me a lot of answers.”
To that end, maybe enlightenment lies in the mundanity of life, too. “If you wanna learn how to find your Dao, go spend some time in traffic. It’s a little bit similar in some lineups, isn’t it? Bouncing back and forth between that yin and yang,” he muses, trailing off in thought, but coming back around before long: “Hopefully, when you take a deep breath, you can slow down and get somewhere near the middle, that tranquility found at the center of all things and events.”
Related: How To Be A Better Surfer In and Out of the Water According to Gerry Lopez
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