The Drift

To Begin Again

The hidden encouragement in this year's high profile commencement speeches.

Over the course of the past few weeks, little snippets of college graduation commencement speeches have managed to find themselves on my computer screen. The commencement speech — a genre in and of itself — has seemed recently to be an analysis of the modern world as the speaker sees it. A warning shot and call to arms to the capped-and-gowned students who amass themselves into a listening audience, awaiting a fresh start in a perceived new world. The web has been abuzz, mostly, with Denzel Washington’s invitation for failure, as the very real possibility of failure inevitably lies around the corner of every attempt at greatness. He calls for the understanding, as I see it, to treat failure as merely a brick on the pathway towards success…

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The Drift

Good Charity

After a string of natural disasters, how do we even begin to give?

Shortly after the February 22, 6.3 magnitude earthquake that rocked the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, I started to worry about my Kiwi friend, Paul. Paul is a Christchurch firefighter, which would put him right on the front lines of a natural disaster. The only message I had received after immediately trying to contact him was a, “Hey all, I’m OK, get back to you when this is cleaned up,” type of auto-response email. It wasn’t until a few days ago, however, that I received the personalized response that even though he is in fact physically OK, Christchurch is in a much worse state of disarray than I had initially realized. Quick back story: I met Paul in 2009 in Indonesia. We were both part of a seven-man crew spending 10 days sailing…

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The Drift

So Long, Winter

Thoughts on my re-acquaintance with a season

Two of my close friends and fellow surfers, Matt and Bill, lived the dream of an "endless summer" during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter of 2008-2009. While I received the invitation to join them to lifeguard on Australia’s East Coast, I could only counter their offer with the frustration of my commitment to a year of graduate school. As I suffered through classes and lived through yet another blustery New Jersey winter, I continually thought of my friends’ travels Down Under and grew envious. I vowed that, regardless of whatever ensuing job offer may come my way, I would defer and instead head to Australia myself the very next year. When my friends arrived back to the States late that spring, I was shocked at Matt’s attitude toward the …

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Destruction I Have Dodged

Comprehending worldwide devastation from the New Jersey homefront

Keeping in the vein of making things harder for myself than they probably should be, I have come to ascertain that one of the aspects I love about living in Beach Haven is the distance that separates me from the rest of the world. Tucked away on the south end of Long Beach Island, even getting to Genuardi’s in Barnegat becomes a perverse chore that sometimes takes outlandish dedication to actually get to, especially if the traffic lights on the island have been switched to "on." For us to go from here to Australia, in other words, is a whole different kettle of fish compared to someone who lives in Hawaii. To get to Singapore, from here, involves much more commitment than it does for someone who lives in Germany, and so on; and yes I know …

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The Drift

Surfing and the Search for Solitude

Or, why I might take up mountain climbing

A good friend of mine who resides on the east coast of Florida (and who is a surfer) used to try to sell me on rock-climbing. He would often say that climbing is what surfers in Florida do when the ocean is flat. Truth be told, these guys spend a serious chunk of their life scaling granite. What I was at first ignorantly confused about was how one would go about becoming such an avid climber in a region that is more renowned for its high rise condominiums than any mountain or craggy peak anywhere within logical driving distance. He described a climbing gym with a man-made 30-foot climbing wall; a place meant to allow one to hone their skills for future trips to more topographically diverse regions of our country, or to prepare themselves …

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