Let’s play it back in the same blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace that it seemed to happen: There was “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the Zika virus outbreak, the EU Migrant Crisis, Obama’s historical visit to Cuba, the Orlando nightclub shooting, Brexit, many Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the Rio Olympics, the US presidential election, Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and most recently, the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Oakland Ghost Ship Fire. There was a lot of tragedy and a lot of “truth stranger than fiction.” Closer to our aquatic home was the John John Florence world title, which seemed to be universally heart-warming and hope-inducing.

We surfers get to experience time in a unique way. While tube riding is a fast-twitch, lightning-reflex game, it’s also a quiet meditation. Seconds are suspended. The ticking clock seems to accordion outward, breathing, giving space. And then there’s that profoundly poetic act of straddling board and contemplating the horizon. Is there a better place to think, ponder, reflect? “The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing” goes a Babylonian Proverb. The same could be said about surfing.