Lois Bloom said some of the most significant words in my life to me when she turned around in the car and asked me “Why not?”
She and her husband Sam had just picked me up from the airport in Orange County where I had flown in to speak at an event several days later. First, I was going to spend a few days with them at their house and a friend I was texting in the car asked if I was going to surf while I was in LA.
I told Lois and Sam this, and that I had told him no, and that’s when Lois turned her head toward me in the back of the car and said, “Why not? You can rent a surfboard.”
But I also hadn’t thought to bring a swimsuit, I told her– not even addressing that I’d only been out on a surfboard three times and was both exhilarated and still fearful of the experience.
“You can buy one,” she reminded me.
I don’t want to say that I was raised in a home where new opportunities weren’t encouraged because that wasn’t the case. As I grew older, I began to sense that because my mom had spent all but the first six years of her life with the effects of Polio lurking in the background and being told she couldn’t even have ballet slippers because she couldn’t wear them, that life became more reserve, more tentative.
I wondered in later years, while my friends were on the swim team and soccer team, why I hadn’t been asked if I wanted to do them. She told me I’d shown no interest although when I asked to join summer track after sixth grade she signed me up and took me to buy a very new thing, running shoes.
Surfing had been something I never thought I would do, after all, in that time you didn’t see girls on surfboards like we do now, and having had the opportunity three times, that was great.
But Lois knew there was no reason I couldn’t do more of it. And she was right. She, Sam, and I took what I called a “family outing” to the surf shop and I rented a board and a wet suit. I found a bikini between Target and TJ Maxx. I took one lesson and then for those few days I was in LA, I drove down to the beach attempted to get up on the board. Even if I paddled around, even if it were a cloudy and dreary day (it was June gloom), I got out on the water, shivering, and did it anyway.
By the time, I returned to Chicago– where I was living at the time– I called Jamie, the surf shop owner and a board maker, and asked him when he could have a board ready for me.
Why not? I thought.
I won’t say that I’m any great surfer because I’m not, but the lessons from surfing, from the ocean, have taught me more in those eight years since I got the board than in most of my life.
All because of two words, one question. Listen. There is always a way forward to more.