One Thing or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – Found At Sea
I’m currently updating these columns to publish as a 2nd edition this year, as a handout for my autobiographical journaling participants. They can all relate.
By Mark McNease
While I’ve always been a river person much more than an ocean person, my fondness for large bodies of water remains. Humans seem to share this, or at least many of us. There’s something about water … Is it where we came from? Does it remind us of the first nine months of our lives? We’ll be going on another cruise soon, and my favorite part of it is always the sea days. Someday I’ll be as the drop of water returning to an infinite vastness of it. Until then, I’ll be drawn to the streams and the lakes and the rivers and the oceans.
BODIES OF WATER HOLD A fascination for many people, as well as providing an indescribable comfort. I grew up in an Indiana town with two rivers, and I live just a mile from the magnificent Delaware flowing slowly between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For me there has always been something about the movement of these vast waterways that felt like home, as if I really am a fish out of water longing to jump back in where I belong and swim away.
Oceans are like that, too, multiplied a million times. Oceans are adventures without end, journeys we can only take with our minds. Even if we sail out on them in boats or cruise ships, they’re so much bigger than we are that it makes us aware of our true size. Oceans and rivers, lakes, and even streams, cannot be argued with. They are the masters of us, not us of them, and their indifference is acute. An ocean doesn’t care what I think about world events or political developments, loves lost or triumphs enjoyed. Like its celestial counterpart spread across the night sky in a trillion tiny lights, it doesn’t even know I’m alive, reminding me that I needn’t be so consumed with own existence. I’m here. So what? I’ll twinkle like a star, leap like a fish in the shallows, break like a wave, and then I’ll go away. I think of that as peaceful, not sad.
A day at the beach gives me an opportunity to reflect quietly with a few hundred other people scattered around us. We have our blanket, our chairs and umbrella, and they have theirs. We notice them, they notice us, observing a serene gathering of strangers who, under other circumstances, may not be so kind to each other. Opinions, frustrations, divisions, ambitions, failures and successes, all stop at the water’s edge. It’s as if we leave them behind in the car, unwilling and unable to be burdened with them for the next few hours. We want to sit or lie on the sand, listen to the sound of other humans and a few seagulls, and glance every now and then out to sea.
The ocean has no use for our rivalries. It comes toward us in waves and tides, and nothing we do can stop it. We know this. The ocean knows this. We will never be evenly matched, so we surrender for a day and enjoy the pleasures that come with being grains of sand on a beach with an infinite number of them. There is great freedom in being unimportant, in knowing we’ve come from the sea and will return there, someday, somehow. In our bathing suits, protected from a sun far greater than the oceans, we relax into nothingness, liberated by our own sheer smallness. Another great day at the shore.