One with the Water — Suzey Ingold

“Most people would be on the beach by now,” my surf instructor comments as I emerge from beneath a wave, my board bobbing up beside me. “You know you can take a break, if you want.”

I shake my head. “I’m good.” It’s a bit of an exaggeration. Salty seawater is searing the back of my throat, so much so that I’ll nearly gag on the next mouthful. The corner of my eyes are stinging and my nose is definitely burning in the late morning sunshine reflecting off the crystal blue of the ocean. The skin over my left knee split open on my first wave of the day and I can only hope there actually aren’t sharks this close to the shore or I’ll be their first target.

(One of my classmates had cautiously asked after them this morning and our instructors had been suspiciously quiet for a long while before responding: “Well, of course, there are sharks but…)

My instructor chuckles and gives me a hand to haul me back up to my feet. “You’re doing great,” he reminds me before swimming off to check on the others.

Some people might call me stubborn – and I am, to be sure – as a I wade back into the waves that have been picking up momentum through my morning surf session, but that sense of sheer determination is woven into my very being. When I set my mind to something, that’s it – there is no turning back. There is no rolling up onto the beach to rest my aching back or examine whether my knee is going to need medical treatment (it did, but I dealt with that in the Gold Coast airport on an eight hour delay like any normal person would).

My mum wouldn’t call it stubbornness, she’d call it sisu – a uniquely Finnish concept that translates roughly to strength of will, determination, and perseverance. And, at that moment, swimming out from the eastern coast of Australia, my entire being was focused on staying in the water as long as possible.

I think my instructors were a little baffled by me, not least by the third day.

“Most people don’t do the three days in a row,” one of them told me. “Or, if they do, they don’t stay in the whole time.”

I laugh even though I am exhausted. I take a five minute break on the shoreline while one of them sits with me and has a quick check of my knee.

“You’ll be all right,” he reassures me, in the very laidback Aussie manner that both of them exude. They are both exactly what I would have pictured Australian surf instructors to be like. I adore them both, and their reassuring grins as they toss me forward into incoming waves, instantly.

“Right, then.” I stand back up. He rolls his eyes.

Underneath the determination, there is something else, too – something that pushes past the fact that the sun is beating down today and my shoulders are tight from several days in a row of battling against the surf. I let out a breath as the water washes over my toes again and I submerge myself back into the ocean. I brush through my hands through the white wash and smile through the salt coating my lips.

With water, I feel at peace, even in the roughest of waves. Perhaps, it comes from growing up by the North Sea, a sight rarely peaceful but always beautiful nonetheless. Of spending summers by the vast Finnish lakes, its often cold water never deterring me from dipping in for a swim out into its depths.

The Finnish lakeside is a far cry from the Australian coastline.

This water, here in Australia, is unfamiliar to me, but we’re learning one another. We’re working together.

Most of the time, anyway. As the ocean deposits me back at the shore again and I blink water out of my eyes with a groan, I catch my instructor watching me with an amused grin.

“I’ve never seen anyone glare at the ocean before,” he comments.

“Well, maybe, the ocean could work with me today,” I mutter, picking myself up.

For all that Australia was a place I didn’t quite wrap my head around in my (relatively) short time there, one thing I connected to was the ocean, for every moment I saw it. The waves of the Great Ocean Road lining the landscape for miles as I drove around it for miles with my family even as sweat pooled on the back of my neck from the heat. The perfect turquoise blue of Moreton Island on my second full day in the country that welcomed me in to explore its aquatic life and wreckages.

To me, water – in all its forms – is healing. I recently visited a Nordic spa north of Toronto with a friend and found myself gravitating toward longer and longer cold plunges – from 10 seconds up to 45 by the time we left. Even in that sheer numb feeling, as goosebumps flared up across my skin and my breath came out in icy clouds, I could feel the blood pulsing through my body. Healing me from the outside in.

Despite still living by the water, I don’t feel that same sense of comfort being in Toronto. In a built-up city, I rarely see the water, even though my office is only a few blocks away from Harbourfront. Something of the murky depths of Lake Ontario, particularly that against the Toronto shoreline, does not appeal as a source of healing – at least as long as the memory of getting E. coli poisoning from swimming in it last summer holds clear in my mind.

It is little wonder, then, that I am drawn to stories of the water. Many of the books I’ve written revolve around the water in some way, from the rough seas of the West Indies to the mysterious depths of the Finnish lakes. Even the Arno River plays a rather key role in my recent Florence-set adventure. The next idea I have is nothing but water.

Water became my healing in the years after I overcame my fear of it (you can blame my older brother for that one). Past the place of difficulty and challenge, we can find comfort. In the same way, I will keep riding these rough waves to gentle blue surf that inevitably awaits.