Mandela's political evolution was gradual.

Inequality is on the rise.

You have to hate how the world goes on.

Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

And I saw surfing that day – by Leslie Wong, among others – that made my chest hurt: long moments of grace under pressure that felt etched deep in my being: what I wanted, somehow, more than anything else. That night, while my family slept, I lay awake on the bamboo-framed couch, heart pounding with residual adrenaline, listening restlessly to the rain.

It was, once again, a glorious wave, with hues in its depths so intense they felt like first editions – ocean colors never seen before, made solely for this wave, this moment, perhaps never to be seen again.

I copied out a passage from Lord Jim: “We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.

Being friends as in writing letters was so much easier than being friends as in living together.

I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.

Being adjacent to that much beauty – more than adjacent; immersed in, pierced by it – was the point. The physical risks were footnotes.