A Moment Of Reflection On Where I Am, Who I Am--
February 1, 2022
It's a clear but windy day at Coral Beach in Puerto Escondido. It gets one thinking, "how do I feel about where I am"?
It's easy to fade into irrelevance here and submit to a diminished sense of identity, where "work" has a different meaning entirely, if it exists as a thought object at all. So I work on ideas for writing and study Spanish, which is no easy thing as there are many distractions of the sort you would imagine. We are reminded of our own youth while surrounded by those not yet aged, a youth which is just a shadow cast upon the sand, that fades away quickly with the procession of the day.
Being a city kid from Philly, I rarely took the time or opportunity to slow down and enjoy those simple things which Nature offers. Busy busy busy, with too much business.
Now life, no, actually the world looks different. Not perfect by any means, but different. I can walk here for an hour on a stretch of deserted Beach, see no buildings, no hotels, with only hills, sand, clear skies and water visible. And looking out at the Pacific, I'm seeing the world almost exactly as it looked 100,000 years ago to the very oldest of the ancients. This is humbling, and possibly the true meaning of the word awesome, before that word became just a popular Meme.
This can be a moment in which you are not only connected to Nature, but feel free from social convention, expectations and career pressures, free for a glorious instant from those blasted Internet algorithms which stalk you and single you out as "special," just like everybody else who is looking at and thinking about the same thing at the same time is "special."
It's a transitory moment of respite from a world becoming less free by the day, because of our electronic dependency on what we now call "technology" which are really only those collections of childhood toys which somehow grew up to now be called "devices." With an act of will, you can turn off all of these things completely and not even suffer for an instant the expected pangs of withdrawal, if you relax enough to focus intensely on that spot in front of you where the Ocean meets the sky.
You can feel the creative tension between the Ocean waves, the undersea life, and the Birds which traverse the skies above it, all following their natural and instinctual electromagnetic pathways to hospitable climate, plentiful food and breeding grounds, and we can hear the almost musical balance of forces which holds this fragile choreography together.
It's just another day, which is in itself a miracle. Some good fortune, or some aspect of fate put me here to see it and make a vain attempt to describe it, as if I were the first and only person to ever walk on a Beach. After a lifetime of visiting Beaches and Oceans, this place still fills me with wonder after five months. Maybe because I'm seeing it all as if it were the first time.
If anything is to be learned, it's that we work infinitely too hard at achieving the state of happiness, often by moving from place to place, hoping we will finally find it when we get there. And the irony is, the happy place we wish for will more often find us wherever we are, not the other way around, if we let it.
