"Readiness isn't a feeling," she said in a Brazilian accent.
We chatted over grilled octopus, standing to eat like everyone does in San Sebastián. A long oak bar, the clinking of glasses, and the smoke from the grill filled the small restaurant. Something about that format makes conversation feel organic. A couple from Canada, a strange lurking man from Denmark, not too many locals - which isn't surprising, as the place was brought to fame by the late Anthony Bourdain.
I spent the day surfing. Day five in a row, and I was finally starting to feel confident. As confident as a boy from Texas can be on the Spanish Atlantic coast. I grew up on lakes and the muddy water of the Gulf, but learning to surf has been a goal of mine for a long time.
I'd also spent that morning rereading articles and stories I wrote in my early twenties, most of them nearly ten years old. I had such confidence then, writing titles like What Year 23 Taught Me About the Truth of Life. A year ago I would've been embarrassed reading them. I've given my younger self more grace now. He was trying his best, even if he was overly confident. Now I mostly laugh.
These days, I have a much different view of the meaning of life. I'm less interested in finding the answer myself and more curious about how other people orient their lives around whatever they believe it to be. Someday I may find it, but I think I'm still a ways away.
The woman I was talking with worked at the UN. She had spent the last year living nomadically after years in New York. We connected over naming our favorite Fort Greene restaurants - Miss Ada and Theodora - before drifting into conversations about her work in vaccine prevention, media literacy, and eventually, as all good conversations do after a few glasses of wine, the meaning of life.
As we ate our food and drank our wine, occasionally getting bumped into as people reached over the glass cases full of pintxos, she mentioned a phrase that had recently stuck with her.
"Readiness isn't a feeling."
I repeated it back to myself.
"Oh, I like that."
"I do too," she said. "It seems like a pretty good way to live. Take a step, then figure out the path after."
"Is that what this year of nomadic living has given you?"
"For better or worse. It's hard to know when to leave a city and move on to the next one. For the first four months, I thought I would feel it. You really never do. You just have to make the decision, and the feelings come after."
There's something there. Not a life-altering string of four words, but another little nugget of truth you can put in your pocket.
My last day in San Sebastián was the next day. For the first time all week, the sun stayed out from morning until evening. After waiting in line for the steak I'd been thinking about all week - another Bourdain recommendation - and finishing The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemingway, I grabbed a surfboard from the shop and headed to the beach.
The waves were good. Rolling, long, four-foot swells. It made for a busy day in the water. A sea of colored boards filled the east side of Zurriola Beach. Mostly locals on shortboards. If my skill didn't give away that I was a beginner, my eight-foot foam board certainly did.
For the past few days, I'd practiced on the tiny waves on the west side of the beach, crowded with surf schools and first-timers. You didn't really need to watch the waves. An instructor would push you into one, or the wave would simply pick you up like you were on a boogie board.
But forty yards from shore, in water deep enough that you couldn't touch the bottom even if you tried, timing became everything.
The trap I learned after a few nasty wipeouts - one leaving a bruise on my face when my board came back and hit me just below what could've been a black eye - was that you can't watch the wave all the way in.
The first instinct is to keep looking over your shoulder. Is it too steep? Too small? Am I too early? Too late? But every instructor told me the same thing: once you've decided it's your wave, stop looking back. Put your head down and paddle.
For a few seconds, you have no idea if you've timed it right. All you can do is commit. Then, almost without noticing, the water changes beneath you. The board begins to lift. That's when you know.
If you wait until you're certain, the wave has already passed.
I thought back to our conversation over grilled octopus the night before.
For months, she had waited to feel ready to leave one city for the next. I had been waiting to feel ready before paddling into bigger waves. Neither of us ever got the feeling first.
It came after the decision.
A younger version of me would've ended this story by telling you that's the secret to life. I don't think that anymore. Or at least try not to.
I just know that, somewhere between a conversation over grilled octopus and an afternoon in the Atlantic, I found another small truth worth carrying around.
Put yourself in the right place. Commit. Paddle without sight. Trust yourself to stand.
Readiness isn't a feeling.