My father is a lung doctor, but his sub-specialty is diving medicine; if you get the bends while Scuba-diving in much of the Pacific, you’ll get medevaced to Stanford so you can see him.  So, while I was growing up, we spent nearly every summer venturing out to various islands, and I spent a large part of my youth floating and swimming in tropical waters.  (Rough, I know.)  Anyway, one of the main things I learned from that, early on, is that you can’t really fight the surf.  If you want to swim to shore, and there’s a decent swell, it’s nearly pointless to paddle while the water is pulling against you.  Instead, to make it in, you need to calmly tread while a wave draws you towards its face, and then paddle like hell as soon as it reaches you, so you can ride the wave’s momentum toward the shore.

And, in a lot of ways, I’ve found that’s how life works, too.  Sometimes, the waves are pulling against you, and you just need to tread.  But that’s also when you’d best get ready, so you can get as much forward motion as possible out of the paddling once the time is right.  It’s a cycle I’ve lived through countless times.  And yet, even so, each time I’m stuck treading, I feel like maybe I’m stuck for good.

In a lot of ways 2018 has been a treading year.  Or, at least, it has been in terms of external productivity.  From an inside perspective, it’s been perhaps the most meaningful year of my life – a chance to take a hard look at myself, and to really figure out who I am and who I want to be.  But what it hasn’t been is a year of doing, a year of making things, or of making things happen, in the broader world.

In the last few days, however, it feels like all of that self-excavation, and a ton of concurrent plan-laying, is now finally coming to its natural conclusion.  It feels like maybe the wave is just starting to pull me up its face.  It feels like 2019 is going be a big year of forward momentum, a year of happily and productively paddling like hell.

Surf’s up.