Laird Hamilton - 12 Mar

IT would be very easy to dismiss Laird Hamilton.

Many have. And still do.

Controversial. Incorrigible. Radical. Visionary. Revolutionary. Disrespectful. Disobedient. Unpredictable. A dick.

Lairds emphatic statement that he would take every wave, and dont get in my way. Big dogs eat first set him up as a potentially extraordinary yet fairly unpleasant growing master of his art.

Playing Lance Burkhart in the seminal 80s surf movie North Shore didnt exactly help his burgeoning reputation as a bad boy.

Even positive comments, as celebratory as they are, seem to be in some ways still intent on putting him back in a box.

There are many people who view Laird Hamilton as a force of nature. His last book was titled exactly that. Whether Lairds tongue was at this point firmly in his own or someone elses cheek is not clear. (Laird is surprisingly humble about himself.)

But for many people, when they watch a YouTube clip, or look at a magazine spread, or hear a podcast, they simply see and hear a slightly folksy, big wave culture; a lifestyle of fitness routines and superfoods; and a surfer narcissism of wave first always.

This is to some extent understandable. The internet is teeming with Lairdness and Lairdisms. Lairds aphorisms are everywhere.

But theres a lot more to Laird than meets the eye. And to dismiss him as mostly irrelevant to us land-based folk, or to park him as some type of Peter Pan figure, is to miss something.

In some ways Laird is like the waves he rides. Seemingly simple. Yet intriguingly complex.

Liferider is a small journey into that.

Liferider is Lairds view from the lip of life; observations from where he is right now on how we might better manage the turbulence of lifethe biggest wave well ever rideby reaching back into the brilliant creature we are, instead of always reaching up to the being we aspire to be.

If Force of Nature captured Laird, the hee naluthe Wave Sliderby skimming across the surface and sheen of the lifestyle of one of the worlds greatest big wave surfers, Liferider is the foil that taps into the energy inside his wave. To reach a little deeper, and range a little wider, through the brilliant creature that is Laird Hamilton.

Brilliant creature is not a grand title only to be applied to a celebrity surfer, it is the Liferider term for who and what we are at our best.

Laird believes were all brilliant creatures, and that we have only just started to tap into the amazing human organism that we are.

When you strip everything back, down to the most basic elements of our species, we as humans can draw on an extraordinarily sophisticated and delicately calibrated combination of physicality, intelligence, emotion, and intuition, at both the conscious and the unconscious level. Our human consciousness lights us up in a way no other species comes close to matching.

In talks with school children, Laird inspires them to take a closer, harder look at the Brilliant Creatures that they are.

You can run, swim, dive, fly. You are amazing. You have untapped potential in you that would blow your mind.

LAIRD HAMILTON

In this also lies one of the truths of Liferider.

While the world increasingly seeks happiness in memes and self-help booksmillions of us reaching upward every day toward some enlightened being that we wish to beLaird is more intent on inspiring us to reach back into the primal organism, the brilliant creature we are: to unlock those doors, throw some of those genetic switches, and mine more of ourselves for ourselves.

Liferider is not against enlightenment. It simply seeks to inspire us to be the best and most brilliant creature that we can be, seen through the lens of Laird. Starting with the physical organism.

The simple premise of Liferider is this: start with the groundwork.

Be the best or fittest organism you can be. Build the best foundation you can from which to then pursue whatever enlightenment or elevation you might desire.

And movement is a keystone of that foundation. Call it exercise. Call it keeping fit. Call it evolution. Call it getting off your ass and doing something. Call it whatever you like. But movement is a crucial part of that groundwork. In order to think, we need to move.

We are built for movement. Movement defines us as creatures.

When we forget to move, we lose momentum. We forget our most basic selves. When our thinking starts to overwhelm our doing, that is not always a good thing.

Less thinking; more doing.

That is how we evolve and continue to grow.

This means movement of every kindphysical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.

In the words of the galactic funkster George Clinton and his seminal funk rock troupe, Parliament-Funkadelic, free your mind and your ass will follow.

Our minds are so consumed these days. Were busy. Busy, busy, busy. And were feeding our brains a tsunami of stimulus every day. Were screenagers, hopping from device to device, consuming the all-you-can-eat, byte-sized buffet of social networks and the connected self.

Technology has created in us a new layer of digital consciousness that enhances and amplifies almost every aspect of our lives; but to a certain degree we are becoming trapped by it. It has become another barrier between ourselves and the brilliant creatures we are.

As we have developed as a species, we have always put up barriers between ourselves and the natural world in which we have evolved. Shelters, walls, windows, roofs, heat. Each layer a new man-made skin.

Staggering invention and innovation have made us the preeminent creature on the planet.

And over the most recent millennia, our minds have gone into overdrive, using the technologies of language, mechanics, engineering, printing; still and moving pictures; telecommunication; and now, digital platforms, networks, and artificial intelligence to propagate the memes of human evolution, and in the process sharing and spreading the word on how to be better and more civilized.