Sometimes in the morning, when it’s a good surf, I go out there, and I don’t feel like it’s a bad world.

Mullis contrasts the abstract idea of “the world” as troubled or corrupt with the immediate, bodily experience of being in nature. Surfing becomes a kind of reset: in the early morning, when conditions are right, attention narrows to rhythm, balance, and sensation, and broader anxieties recede. The line also reflects Mullis’s public persona—skeptical of conventional pieties, drawn to direct experience, and willing to say that mood and perspective can be contingent on environment. It suggests that moments of immersion and competence can temporarily restore faith in life, not by denying suffering, but by revealing that the world also contains beauty and exhilaration.