Relax

Three days without a swim. That’s not particularly unusual but it’s the longest I have gone for several weeks. With warmer water and a blown achilles, I’ve been doing a lot more swimming than running. Anything to avoid the elliptical machine.

I leave at about 8:30 and it is mostly cloudy here at my apartment, but I can see significant portions of blue sky on the Salt Creek web cams. As I arrive at the parking lot, I am delighted to see much more sunshine here than at my apartment. It’s usually the other way around. Well this is very very nice.

At the beach, there is about a three feet berm of sand that is about 5 feet from the rock edge of the beach. This happens this time of year and there was a strong south swell early in the week helping to eat away the shore. However I think this might be the tallest one I have ever seen at this beach. I am happy to say that the sand conditions at the Strand and Salt Creek are much more healthy than the nearby San Clemente beaches. I’m not sure why that is but I’m sure there is a reason. The berm at North Beach and near the pier can grow to be well overhead.

I walk along the upper edge of the berm because I don’t feel like jumping to the basin. It is definitely too much of a drop to just step down to. Fortunately the slope peters out just before my usual starting point. I miss being able to walk along the shore with my feet in the water. So as soon as I can I get my feet wet to gauge the water temperature not to mention to soak in the good vibes of the ocean.

It feels about the same as it did on my last swim last Saturday. I’ve been watching the buoys every day (of course) and on Sunday and Monday, temps actually came up a bit but they dropped slightly later Monday. All in all things are pretty much how I left them on Saturday - maybe ever so slightly warmer. I’m gonna call it at 66. That’s not bad. It’s still what I would call nice. Because it IS nice.

I swim north today. It’s so lovely out. The water is calm and smooth. One thing that very much stands out is the underwater visibility. There isn’t any. Late last week was pretty clear but it is as cloudy as can be right now. I’m blaming the swell from hurricane Narda.

It seems like we get more and more light as the swim progresses and the clouds all drift away until there is just a mass of it lingering a good ways off shore which in and of itself looks very very beautiful. The sun dominates the southern end of the sky just above the bluff which causes the shore to appear as a long and lovely black silhouette. As I swim north I face the horizon and I just keep my gaze fixated on the large blue pocket of sky just below the hazy white mass above it. It is so soothing to look at and for all I care that is all that exists here and everywhere.

The vista to the north has a lot more color to it than the south. The light causes the water to glow a soft, dark blue and the end of Monarch Bay is gorgeous as it recedes from lush brush, to solitary pines and finally a bare golden finger tip that loses itself in the water. I see several cormorants flying about. I think I only see a single pelican today and a couple seagulls.

There are moments where the sun gets brighter and brighter and I mentally open my sun receptors to photosynthesize all the light that I can into luscious heart warming energy. All is well here. Here and everywhere. I watched a YouTube video last night of someone describing their experience after having died and then being resusetated. She said she came away with this sense that all is well. In spite of all the hardships in this world, everything is as it should be. This life is just a big school that our souls journey through and from the other side it feels so far far away. So I am thinking about how all is well regardless of all the things in my life that feel significantly out of whack.

I’ve been reading this book by Julia Cameron called It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again. Ms. Cameron also wrote the popular Artists Way and has built a career around helping others to get in touch with their creative sides. This book I am reading is a variation on that theme and focuses on those at or near retirement age. The book asks you to divide your age by 12 and then focus on those number of years for every chapter. So last night I read the chapter focusing on ages 15 to 19. It brought up many feelings.

A lot happened in my life in those years - some good and some terrible. The chapter focused on purpose and legacy and asked you to recall what kind of memories, thoughts and emotions came up in the shadow of those years along the topic of purpose. It made me realize how lost I was in those years. Not “lost” as in having gone astray or anything like that. Rather, I felt like I was living in a sort of fog that I can only see now in retrospect. We are all born into this life and then we try to make sense of it and make our way forward as best we can. At age 15, what the hell do we really know. Of course we THINK we know everything and some of us may know significantly more than others.

Probably like a lot of 15 year olds, I swam in a sea of thoughts, theories and ideas about the world passed on by the previous generations before me and the myths (true and false) we are fed through popular culture and social institutions. I remember struggling to chart a course for my life that could get me to a place I wanted to be. And I remember those places I wanted to be and how strange and malformed they seem today. I remember feeling pressure (largely from myself) to make this all work and fear that I would get it wrong. Even in the later end of that time span from 17 to 19 when I was a fired up evangelical Christian, I didn’t have any understanding of what faith was. I thought faith was yet another thing we have to work at to muster. Yet another thing that we are left to our own efforts to nurture and develop. As I try to put myself back in that 15-19 year old perspective, I felt so cosmically alone. There seemed to be so much risk of unredeemable failure.

I try to think what could 57 year old me tell that person. That person who was trying so hard to be good at things. Some of these things I was actually good at but I probably could have been even better if I was not trying so hard. I got really into acting for a few years. I was pretty good. Then I became interested in Christianity and my acting ambitions faded. However I was still involved in this play at the time. As my acting ambitions declined, I actually got a lot better at this role because I could relax and it didn’t feel like there was so much at stake.

So I think maybe that’s the message I send. Relax. Let your talents emerge naturally as you follow what gives you joy. Focus on the joy. You don’t need to make things harder than they are. You are not alone. There is guidance and a plan and everything will be a lot easier if you trust the process and let it happen. Not trying so hard does not mean conceding defeat. You just need to set the intention and keep an equanimous focus on that. Then I realize that’s pretty much the same message I need to soak in right now at 57. It’s probably the same message I’ll need to hear at 70.