Oh to Be. I’m now older than before, and I’m perhaps enjoying life more than ever. Or, perhaps, I’m simply beginning to know Life more.

Being crests, and undulates, and ebbs, and runs. Flung by each wave to ever-highs and ever-lows, but knowing this patterning greater than before. Is this not the patterning of an ever-bettering surfer?

Waves flow and beat as they ever did – always blue, always frothy, and propelled forever by an energy entirely ungraspable. But the washing-machine of submersion fails to choke as it once did.

Just hold tight, and know you’ll be spat out on the other side.

More waves will come, but they have not the All-Consuming fury that they once did.

To surf is not to resist, but to come attuned to the movement of the swell. Perhaps, the Knowing of Existence is of this same practice.

As Self crystalises, as prefrontal cortexes cease their major developmental phase, perhaps too we know better the foam, fiberglass and resin upon which we stand. Our platform’s standing; the vessel that carves, and which we ride atop.

What is anticipated to be the result of a Fifty-Year-Storm instead breaks sooner. What feels like the bubbling foam of the white-tops instead is the ever-creeping of an incoming tide, drawing one closer ashore.

Unexpected, unpredictable, varied, and complex. Gloriously complex.

A train is delayed by an hour. A previously-secure place of sleep is not in fact so. An imagined losing of a laptop, or a toothbrush, or a bottle of water. Delays, losses, advancements, unannounced arrivals.

It’s all okay.

Everything is alright in the end, because if it’s not alright; well, then, it’s not the end.

But of course, at some point the end of all ends will arrive.

“In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be 33; That doesn’t really matter next to eternity; But I like a double number, and I like an odd one too,” sings Big Thief on their new album.

Nothing matters when placed aside the Big Forever Blue.

But this really does matter. For if not this, then nothing.

I’ve been deeply, deeply saddened by the death of Charlie Kirk.

He speaks not of politics that are mine, but he speaks of values I hold forever dear. Of believing something to be important, and of working toward this end through open communication and sincere engagement.

He leaves behind a wife, and two children, and by many accounts – even of those with whom he disagreed most vehemently – he was a wonderful father and husband.

He was 31. Thirty-one, and full of life, vivacity, of desire and belief and conviction and passion. And then, a singular bullet bursts his carotid artery, and Charlie Kirk is no more.

The shooter. You fucking idiot. You stupid, senseless, moronic tool. Nothing more, and nothing less. Pathetically, crushingly, tragically, idiotic.

For murder does not kill a voice. It does not destroy an idea, or a movement.

 Anger begets greater anger, yes, and senseless anger will exacerbate in the wake of this. Trump’s anger and grief in his briefing following the murder of Kirk was palpable. He blames liberals, and Democrats, and sees solely in his entrenched framing of partisan divide.

But this is not what he really felt, although I fear he did not know it.

What he felt was sadness. The sadness borne from the senseless snuffing of Being. And there is no greater tragedy than this.

Charlie no longer will surf his own ocean of samsara.

No longer will he kiss his wife, or hold his children, or fight tirelessly for what he believed to be Right.

No longer will he wake to a morning of sunlight, and thank his God for the day he had been miraculously given.

No longer will he know the ceasing of day, nor the miracle of dream, nor then the subsequent miracle of day.

May Donald J. Trump understand that what crushes him today, truly, is the knowledge of this.

May the United States of America – that beautiful, blighted, poor child of a nation – know this too. And may it find equanimity, and a re-Uniting, and solace.

And may Charlie Kirk rest in peace.

As your day breaks, or as it crests and troughs and swells and breaks all over again. May you find perspective as to how precious this moment of surfing really is.

For none of us know when it all so suddenly will be taken away.