When I think about the years I spent chasing waves and summits, I usually remember the beauty first: the cold air above the tree line, the patience of waiting for a set, the quiet after a long day on snow. I really did love those things. I still do.
I also wonder now what else they were giving me.
Parenthood has made me look again at the way I have moved through my life. While trying to understand my son's energy and attention, I learned something I had not known: I was diagnosed with moderate ADHD as a child. My mother had not really talked about it, so the diagnosis was never part of how I understood my own choices. I do not want to reduce years of joy to a symptom. But knowing this now gives me a clearer way to ask whether some of my most intense pursuits were also ways of finding steadiness.
In Tofino, I surfed nearly every day, sometimes twice. In Whistler, I could snowboard more than fifty days in a year while working full time, going to the gym, practising yoga daily, and keeping up a life of reading and prayer. In another year, back in Banff, I climbed fifty-nine summits. When I spent winters on Vancouver Island, I mountain biked whenever I could. Looking at the list now, I can almost hear how breathless it sounds. At the time, it felt like a way to live.
The outdoors offered more than excitement. Sitting beyond the break, waiting for a wave, could be peaceful and contemplative. The wave had to come in its own time. I had to notice it, be ready, stand at the right moment, and let a sequence of physical movements come together with precision. On a mountain, a long climb gave restless energy a direction and a rhythm: step, breath, step. In both places there was calm within movement.
At times, I probably was running from stillness. But in those same years I also sought silence, prayed intensely, read the Christian contemplatives, and eventually entered religious communities. I was not avoiding the spiritual life by moving. I may have been finding one way to approach it.
I grew up in a part of North American culture that knew how to honour action. Snowboarding was taking shape around me when I was young. Surfing, mountain biking, and mountain travel offered freedom, skill, and friendship. We had a language for adventure. We had less language, at least in the circles I knew, for the way movement might help a person gather attention or feel at home in his own body.
Yoga gave me another way to notice that possibility. When I began practising it daily, I was not discovering movement for the first time. I was learning to bring a different quality of attention to something my body already knew it needed. Breath and posture could be observed without a summit to reach or a wave to catch. The activity was smaller, but the question became more exact: what happens in me when I slow down enough to notice an impulse before I follow it?
Prayer and meditation posed a related question. Silence sometimes brought joy, and sometimes it made agitation impossible to miss. I used to imagine that a serious contemplative life required me to leave my appetite for motion behind. Now I am less sure. Perhaps the work was to understand that appetite: when it helped me become present, when it became another search for the next peak, and when I needed to sit still without asking the body to carry me away.
I remember a winter day surfing in Tofino. I caught some good waves. Afterward, a few kids on the beach came over, excited by one of the rides, and asked where I was from and how I had learned. I felt pleased, even proud. I had done what I went there to do, and someone else had seen it. Then I got back to the car. The anxiety was still there. So was the craving for more. I was not an expert surfer; I was never an expert at any of these sports. But even when I reached the level I had sought, the satisfaction did not last. Sometimes I felt entirely dissatisfied.
That does not make the beauty of the wave unreal. It shows me how much I was asking it to do. The joy of movement and the peace of nature were genuine; so was the cycle of wanting, getting, and wanting again. A day outside could return me to myself in ways an hour of thinking never did. It could not, by itself, settle a mind that insisted on the next experience.
As a father, I do not want a newly discovered diagnosis to become a tidy explanation for my past or a definition of anyone else's future. Energy is part of a person, not the whole story. I want to be curious about what steadies a child, what delights him, and what asks too much of him. That curiosity changes how I remember my younger years. I see someone moving hard and searching earnestly, trying to inhabit the world.
The mountains and the water did not give me a final answer. They did give me moments when the body, attention, and joy belonged to the same life. Yoga helped me recognize that more clearly. Meditation asked me to stay when the movement stopped. I am still learning how to hold those lessons together, and how to make space for another person to find his own way.