The False Security of Caution

I received sad news while I was in Mexico. The simple heartbreak kind that made my eyes water and my stomach feel sick.

I wanted to ask this person if he was in collusion with the universe, and if there was some great plan to prevent me from ever going abroad alone in any kind of peace. "I could have told you in Panama, or in LA, he said... but..." Forty-eight hours on solid foods, sitting over a beautiful ocean view. Alone. With the beautiful backdrop of palm trees and the concierge desk asking every person who walks through: "are you here to celebrate something?"

But I didn't say anything to him. My anger evaporated nearly before arriving. Because even if things don't happen for a reason, they certainly do happen. And there is no point in pretending otherwise, however much I might want to. Especially between us.

And then I almost laughed. It is amazing all of the arms lengths you can put between yourself and someone and still feel like it all meant something. Of course, all of those arms wouldn't be needed if it didn't.

Less than twelve hours later, I was poorly slept and heavy, packing up for an early shuttle ride back to the airport. I laboriously made coffee and walked to my balcony to look out at the ocean. A nagging feeling tugged at me to go back outside. Finally, I consented... "I should go say hello to her. I am here, still."

And even though time was short, I put on my swimming suit, grabbed my phone and key card and walked outside. For at least three seconds, I imagined what it would feel like to walk down the beach and not come back to my life. "That would only be harder, really," I said catching myself immediately. Once I got to the sand, I slipped off my sandals. And then I walked to the waters edge and waited. I was standing at the lips of one of the most beautiful oceans in the world, just asking to care about any of it.

"Hello," I said to her. "Maybe you can tell me something?"

I walked along the shoreline, and then at the exact right place, stopped, and faced the water. The sun was up but it was still early, and our part of the beach was deserted. I thought about my growing ability to feel things before and as they happen, and how we clearly, clearly, clearly do not choose our gifts. And even more, about the way we can look out at the world and see so much but still struggle to see our place in all of it. And mostly, how I've increasingly begun to ask dead people for advice because it seems like they're there and if I can feel them anyway, I might as well offer to listen.

"Do you have an active imagination?" a spiritual teacher asked me, calling on all of her powers of diplomacy.
"Honestly? No. Not really." I'd replied, disappointed right along with her.

I stood on the wet part of the sand where the waves come up just sometimes and then more. I felt my feet in the earth. But with each wave that came, I noticed that the sand beneath my feet slipped away. First around the edges, and then under my arches, and then finally, my heels and the balls of my feet. The sand slipped away. Over and over again, I found solid, and then it washed away in bits and pieces out from underneath me.

"Has the ocean always done this?" I asked myself. "Like this?"

I pondered the physics of why the sand underneath my feet would leave so much more quickly than the sand around my feet. "I will have to ask the boys to explain this one to me..." But mostly I just thought "Yes. This. This is what has been happening to me. This is just what it has felt like. You know what I mean, I see."

What do you do when you are standing on the wet sand and the ocean keeps taking away your place to be?

I think the two obvious options are either to go swimming in her waves, or to step back onto the dry sand and walk away. I mean, at least if you don't want the ground pulled out from under you over and over and over again.

Knowing I had little time for exploring, and also that I held in my hands an iPhone to watch the time and a key card which would be essential for me to return... I told myself it would be unreasonable to throw my things on the beach where increasing numbers of people were going for runs or coming out to sunbathe, and that I didn't have a towel, and really, I should just go up to my room and pack. Missing an international flight is not on my bucket list. So I turned away from the water.

And then I thought "No. Who can live like that?"

Like a girl who has never been robbed abroad, I slipped off my dress and set down my sandals and tucked my key and my phone inside, just at the flag line on the sand. I silently prayed no one would take my things, but then shrugged and decided I'd be fine if they did.

I stepped in the ocean. And I walked. And as the water came up above my hips, a wave hit and it almost knocked me over. "Yes, this. This is what I have been feeling," I thought. And I went deeper. Up to my lungs. Another one came, and, thrown backwards, I almost went under. I asked myself why on earth I was letting waves throw themselves at me when I clearly had so much of that already in my life. But there was something so familiar about turning around and facing the shore and letting another one hit my back so hard I couldn't stand up. There was something so familiar about it that I just stood there and kept listening.

I never went under. I could have gone deeper, I suppose, but then the shock of the waves hitting is less, and I always managed to right myself before my head went below. "Is that what I've been so afraid of?" I asked myself, walking with high knees back to the beach. "Probably." So I abruptly turned around, back toward the deeper water, but standing where it was still so, so shallow, and I dove under completely, and came up blinking.

So that was my conversation with her. Maybe next time, we will be able to say more. I am learning that my caution saves me from very little, anyway.

I marched back to shore and picked up my untouched things and returned to my room to wash off the salt and the sand and to pack and to go. To go. Oh Mexico.

In my room, I tucked things into their corners of my backpack, and sat down to write this, nodding to the old familiar heaviness that slipped back in like the most comfortable of friends. I have complicated decisions to make and options to weigh and sadness to consider. I also know to be grateful that my problems are so small. I will sit in the mall-like waiting area of the Cancun airport and I will hear the constant refrain from arrivals "are you here to celebrate something?" And any rueful chuckles of mine will be washed over in the crowd, because I know the magnitude of things and this is a smaller kind of loss. And it is all happening between the gentlest of souls who took the slowest of careful steps, as if we always knew this was on the horizon.

I am willing to imagine it may be for the best. Even though I admit, I have wanted more to hold on to. More than my words. But I am grateful, at least, for this much. We don't choose our gifts, but I do believe it is our life's work to embrace them. How many invitations could I possibly need.

Namaste.