Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. - Rita Mae Brown
I was walking along the beach. It was just before for dinner at the Modern Elder Academy in Baja California Sur, Mexico. It was a characteristically beautiful evening. There were two hurricanes hundreds of miles offshore, generating some huge waves. It occurred to me that I might be able to capture the image of a wave breaking with some rocks in the foreground and the setting sun in the background. On a whim, I decided to venture close to the waterline; close enough to perhaps photograph the crashing waves as they slammed into the rocks. That thought led me to be sitting on some rocks when unexpectedly, the largest set of waves I’d seen that day came rolling in.
I was looking at my phone screen, totally focused on the shot I wanted to take when the first and largest wave of the set surged violently over me, knocking me back onto my right side, tearing the hat and sunglasses off of my head, and briefly submerging my entire body. I was gripping my phone tightly with my left hand as a last-ditch but hopeless and insignificant gesture of control. The rest of my world swirled uncontrollably into chaos.
As the water receded, I watched my sunglasses get sucked out in the backwash and disappear into the sea. I was soaked. My body hurt in multiple places. I felt dazed and confused.
The spot I had chosen for my ill-fated photographic adventure had been uncovered by earlier hurricane-generated waves only a few days before. These were mostly black, volcanic rock - the kind of rock that’s relatively recent (a few hundred or thousand years old versus millions of years). It fractures into sharp, jagged-edged pieces as waves and weather break it down. I glanced at my arms and legs. I had scrapes and noticeable bruises in multiple spots. I was bleeding in many places; not profusely but enough to look like I needed some first aid. As I slowly gathered myself and staggered up to higher ground, I tried to unscramble my mind and make sense of what had happened.
Then it struck me: “Where’s my hat?” I wondered. My yellow, Golden State Warriors hat was gone. That hat and I had been through many years and a lot of experiences together. For some people, my hat was how they identify me. To them, I’m the guy in the Warriors hat. Now, I couldn’t see it anywhere. Sadly, I thought, “There goes my buddy, after all these years.”
For a fleeting moment, I irrationally wondered, “Will people even recognize me? Who will I be without my hat?” It was as if a part of me had died, leaving the rest of me lost and abandoned on the beach in Baja.
It was only after I had returned to the Modern Eleder Academy campus that I realized how poor my thinking and judgement had been that evening. I had not considered the potential consequences of being on those rocks, at that time, and under those circumstances. I had to accept the fact that I put myself in the position that led to my injuries. Yet, I was fortunate. I survived. I could have hit my head or lacerated my body on one of those mercilessly-sharp rocks or been swept out to sea with potentially catastrophic consequences. Fortunately, my gratitude practice kicked in: I felt and experienced deep gratitiude for just being alive, knowing that things could have turned out much worse. Furthermore, I found it very easy to feel grateful. Why? In addition to my habits and routines, I had also experienced a remarkable bit of random good luck. I found my hat.
It had not washed out to sea, as I originally thought. After watching my sunglasses wash away, I assumed that my hat had suffered the same fate. But as I struggled up to a higher point away from the surf, I happened to glance into a small crack between two large sections of lava. Almost but not quite hidden from view in the fading light, there it was; my old friend the yellow hat, trapped in a dark crevice.
Since the spring of 2020 and the beginning of Covid, I had worn my yellow Golden State Warriors cap nearly every day. What began during a season when the ordinary structure of life had collapsed had quietly become part of my identity. It was how people recognized me. This seemed to me to be a small, insignificant habit; a harmless personal signature that makes me easy to spot. Viewed generously, the hat was a grounding ritual: one less decision each morning, a flash of color that perhaps signaled casualness, calm, and steadiness in a world that had just proven how quickly steadiness can vanish. It cost nothing and, on most days, it gave me a comfortable point of connection with strangers who know the team.
But a more probing question is not what the hat expresses but what it might be hiding or defending against. A ritual adopted at the exact moment of collective threat and held unbroken for years can just as easily become armor as it can be an everyday accessory. Thinking back to those brief, confusing moments on the rocks, when I believed that I had lost my hat, I did genuinely feel as if I had lost part of my identity. Was that a bad thing? Was I hiding something from myself and others under that hat?
Wisdom does not require that we abandon our signature pieces, our loyalties, our comfortable versions of ourselves. It requires that we remain willing, periodically, to take them off and see who is still standing underneath. An object like my hat (or Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck or Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s leather jacket) can quietly become more than just a signature look. The trouble with all the stories we wear, not just the visible ones, is that they can start as preferences and end up as walls. Insidiously, we rarely notice the transition from comfortable choice to limiting habit of mind.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” - American author and humorist Mark Twain
Decision-making in our complex and confusing world today is inherently challenging. That day on the rocks, I didn’t exercise good judgement or apply wise decision-making. In hindsight, I’m lucky to be alive to write these words and to reflect on what I can learn from that experience.
Perhaps the most important lesson wasn’t about the waves or the rocks, but about the fragile, naive stories we construct for ourselves. Life, like the ocean, is dynamic and unyielding; it doesn’t care about our comfort zones or our carefully curated identities. By letting go of the need to be the person in the yellow hat - or any version of ourselves we’ve convinced ourselves is permanent - we open space for genuine growth. Sometimes, we have to lose our footing to find our true ground.