Kelly Slater - For The Love - (Page 17)

L E A R N I N G A C C E PC TA N’ TWT OH AC TH A YN OG UE I was really scared of it when I was younger. I can’t say I’m not scared of it now, but I’ve gone through periods in my life where I haven’t been scared of it at all, where the idea of not being here anymore did not scare me. In fact I felt quite comfortable with the idea. I guess that’s what we all need to feel, because we’re all going to die. Maybe that should be taught in schools, how to accept death. Not a scary thing, just realistic. We all need to be able to deal not just with our own deaths but with the deaths of others. Some people say that every fear can be distilled down to a fear of death in its most basic form. When I think about this, I always go back to that game I used to play with Jack Johnson, “You Won’t Go.” There’s a waterfall that we hike to on the Big Island, where from the platform it’s about four hundred feet up and four hundred feet down. You can walk right underneath the waterfall, and a kid we knew slipped and fell and died. I was there one time with a whole bunch of friends, and [former Roxy girl] Sanoe Lake was with us. She stood right under the waterfall, and I was just terrified, thinking she was going to slip and fall. It’s really slippery, and if you fall, you die. I have a little bit of a fear of heights, so I got that tingly feeling. Later I imagined being there and falling, and as I fell, calling to my friends, “You won’t go!” That would be a good death. In essence you’d be saying, I’m going to die right now and I’m not afraid, so don’t be sad. Maybe the fear of death is really the fear that we haven’t achieved the things we wanted to in life—not necessarily the material things, but those regrets about what we didn’t do, the people we weren’t there for, the conversations we didn’t listen to. It’s all about what you leave behind, the memory of who you were, and the better that memory, the easier it is to accept dying. 157 I think about death quite often.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Kelly Slater - For The Love

Kelly Slater - For The Love Preface by Kelly Slater Chapter 1: For the fun Intro Chapter 5: For the road Intro Chapter 6: For the show Intro Chapter 9: For the love Intro Back Cover

Kelly Slater - For The Love

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