In thirty minutes of being in the water today, I was washed back in towards shore six or seven times, without a single attempt at riding a wave. The wind was onshore, and the swell was choppy and relentless. No matter how hard I paddled, I couldn’t make any progress, and I just felt my arms getting weaker with each passing minute. I wanted so badly to just quit. I wanted to go back to my room and sit down with a book, forgetting that I’d ever bothered getting into the water in the first place.

Sometimes life is like that. You feel as though you’re always sitting just inside where the waves are breaking, and try as you might, you just can’t paddle beyond where they keep crashing over your head again, and again. Each torrent of water sends you spluttering ten feet backwards, and flips you ass over teakettle until you can’t remember which way is up, and which way is just another mouthful of water. Your head hits the sand, and you roll again. When you come up gasping for air, the board slams into your shoulder, the sharp fin slashing across your skin.

Today I stuck it out. I paddled harder, pulling until my arms were exhausted, and forcing down the nausea of rough seas and too much salt water in my stomach. Eventually I made it out to a relatively calm spot beyond the building waves. I sat and rested, trying to focus my mind away from some things that were keeping me down, and after a while I turned back towards shore and paddled into a sloppy wave. It broke sharply and closed out on itself, and I ate it pretty hard. As I did on the next wave, and the one after that. It took nearly an hour of suffering and forcing myself to continue before I finally dropped into a wave and stood up smoothly, locking my rail in, and gliding along the surface of the water rolling along beneath me.

Life can be difficult at times, even in a place like the beaches of Costa Rica. As long as you haven’t completely separated your brain from your body, there are things that can get in the way of making progress, or of enjoying yourself whether you’re on vacation, at school, or just at home with someone you love.

The trick is to just keep paddling, even when you’re getting your ass kicked. Sooner or later you’ll be gliding along again, able to forget your troubles and every other bad thing in the world, but it only comes if you force yourself to keep pushing through the rough spots. It may not happen that same day, but hey, there’s always tomorrow.