Steven Kotler is My New Boyfriend, Redux

First, the aforementioned West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief by Steven Kotler. Maybe it is the growing fomentation by too long-stifled wanderlust, or maybe it is passages like:

In The White Album, Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," then proceeded to tell a story about a time in her life when the stories she told herself began to fail. Which may be how things go for many of us, and it certainly was for me...owing to [my] long illness, it had been too long since I'd been someplace tropical. In the years prior, I had spent chunks of my life in far-flung places. When friends asked why I went, I ticked off a long list of mildly verifiable purposes. The truth of the matter was I went to such places are hard to get to and far away. I wanted to be the kind of person who went places hard to get to and far away. I was interested in places that are far away on maps, just as i was interested in places that are far away in reality. I didn't know then, not like I know now, that such places do not always coincide."

Or this:

Maybe that's how it is for all of us. Maybe that's how things go. Maybe we tell ourselves such stories right up until the moment we can no longer tell ourselves such stories. We believe the earth is flat until we believe it is round. We believe in a geocentric universe until we believe in a heliocentric universe. We believe that heliocentric universe governed by a fixed logic until we believe that heliocentric universe all relative. We believe the speed of light is inviolate, until we find out that entangled particles could outpace the speed of light. Scientists now believe that the quantum world is a world of possibility. They believe that our most fundamental level of reality is not any one firm reality, rather the possibility of an infinite number of possibilities. We cannot find the cornerstone of our foundation because everything and nothing are the cornerstones of our foundation. We live in a world of magnificent maybe. And every now and again someone rattles the bones of the past in the direction of the future in the hopes that a wave will rise.

I want to go on a surf quest (or any travel quest for that matter) so badly I ache physically. Anyone up for kayaking Black Canyon over New Year's? Holla back.