Pura Vida

I learned about this phrase a few years ago when my parents visited Costa Rica for the first time with friends. They brought back excellent coffee and stories of beautiful beaches and wildlife. It sounded like paradise. My dad tried to explain that “Pura Vida” was a lifestyle, a sentiment somewhat undercut by the slogan-y nature of the phrase plastered on t-shirts and keychains. I didn’t really get it. 

Then I had the good fortune to go on a birthday trip for one of my favorite people to that very same Central American country, boasting about the Pure Life (Pura Vida). I learned how to surf and have been forever changed. I mean, sort of. 

Let’s back up. 

I’m a competitive person. I tend to avoid activities like bowling and bocce ball because I’m bad at them and sometimes end up getting upset and making a fool of myself. It’s been over a decade since the card game incident that had me running into a closed sliding glass door, thankfully among family. It was not a given that I was going to be cool about learning a new sport like surfing. I’m 41 and have a bad knee. One could imagine that I was setting myself up for failure. 

Maybe it was the years of therapy. Maybe it was being surrounded by other strong women who were being equally vulnerable about trying something new. Maybe it was the natural beauty of the ocean and the lulling call of the water. But I was willing to try, and I understood that part of the process would involve lots of failure. 

People have begun to redefine failure to mean not getting back up after falling, that failure doesn’t truly happen until you stop trying. That’s well and good, but what I was doing in the first couple of days of surf lessons could not be called success. I fell over and over and over. I got knocked down. A wave flipped me and my board. My butt hit ocean floor. I failed time and time again. But it was fun. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it. One friend told me I was smiling every time she saw me during surf lessons. Occasionally they were self-depricating smiles, like grinning while saying, “Shit I fell again.” But I wasn’t getting pissed at myself or holding myself to some arbitrary standard. I never expected to be any good, so when I wasn’t, it was fine. 

I don’t mean for that to sound cynical. What I mean is that I managed to approach it with no expectations for myself. I was curious. I was interested. I was willing. I had 2 days of progress. Then during day 3, progress stalled, and on day 4, my last day, I didn’t care about standing up anymore, but not in a way that meant I was giving up. I just wanted to float on waves on the board and didn’t care if I stood up or not. Then I put the board away and just went back in the ocean for a while. It was peaceful. I felt at peace. 

Where we were, the phrase “Pura Vida” is used a lot of different ways. It’s a response to “thank you,” sort of like “you’re welcome.” It’s a declaration when someone is happy. It’s a response to “I’m sorry,” like “no worries.” I’m sure there are other uses I didn’t hear while I was there. It’s not a simple phrase, which is probably why I’m thinking about it so much. 

My friend and I were talking with our surf instructor, who spoke perfect English while we spoke no Spanish, something I hope to rectify before visiting again. We talked about how imprecise English is, how we have too many words, and I said then, and still think it now, that we use so many words because none of them are quite good enough. We talk and talk, or speaking for myself, write and write, and we never quite say the thing we want to say. I don’t know if Spanish is like this, but I think Pura Vida is a concept we don’t have a word for. 

It’s joyful and calming. It’s aspirational. 

When I got home Wednesday night, all I could think about was how to integrate this Pura Vida mentality into my normal life. After a few days of being home, it now seems fairly obvious that this isn’t possible. Not all the time anyway. But echoes can exist. A breeze ripples one pond before moving to another. 

On the one hand, American life isn’t set up for enjoying life to the fullest. Not now, not with our current politics or economy or day-to-day reality. Not for those who aren't fabulously wealthy. Many of us have jobs that are just jobs, not life callings. Many, or many with whom I spend time these days, have kids and mortgages and cell phone bills and car payments. We all have hidden struggles. And kids bring unending joy, but they also need to go to swimming and soccer and piano lessons, which are just tasks masked as fun. There is rarely a day when I wake up and think to myself, “What a great sleep. Now what would I like to do today?” It’s all pre-planned, scheduled, the opposite of spontaneous. This is what I have chosen - stability over spontaneity. Consistency is good. Making a good life for my kids is good. But it is not Pura Vida.

I’m veering dangerously close to comparing life here to life there, so I’m halting and making a u-turn. I saw a tiny slice of a few people’s lives in a town driven by tourism. I met amazing people who live really cool lives, but I can’t claim to know what the average Costa Rican's day-to-day is like or what their struggles are. What I’m really comparing is my life on vacation to my regular life. Just to make that perfectly clear. 

I wanted to bring Pura Vida home in a way that felt different than just wanting to spend more time by the ocean and have more time off of work. I want to adopt the attitude of joyful acceptance, of non-competitiveness, of rolling with it. It wasn’t just the relaxation or the beautiful scenery. Maybe what made the trip so special wasn’t Pura Vida at all but was the intentional community with whom I experienced it. It would take a lot to explain how all of these women were brought together (it was rowing), but we all shared a bond (mainly rowing), a shared language we could all refer to when we needed connection.

It’s this intentionality that I crave constantly, as well as the joy of full self-expression. Maybe this is the point I've taken too many words to get to, that this is how I picture joy - being my fullest self with people I care about. Perhaps this is my approximation of Pure Vida in practice. Living by the ocean would be nice, but I'll take singing loudly in the car with my kids or laughing over old pictures with old friends. It might not be constant, and days might need to be planned and scheduled, but there can be the fullness of joy within the scaffolding.