Lessons From the Beach

A crowded beach is a sight to behold. Bodies everywhere...prone and upright. Kids running between the blankets which protect oil slathered bodies from the grit and grind of the sand beneath them. There is laughter and muffled sounds of conversations and yelling above the constant blowing of offshore winds. One thing is for sure...the place is alive with life and the energy of lives being lived. It is an early walk on the beach the next morning that that informs us at a deeper level very well.

Generally alone on the beach and walking close to the rhythmic slosh of breaking waves, the lesson is stunningly clear. With the sun coming up in the East and a coolness that will end before long, you plainly see that there is no evidence that the crowd of people there just hours ago, ever existed. The beach has cleaned itself and erased all evidence of the thousands of feet and impressions in the sand that were there just hours ago. The sand castles are gone as are the countless holes dug in the sand by little hands. The tide has come in overnight and simple erased the events and impact of the previous days crowd.

I remember standing on beaches and projecting back even further than just yesterdays crowd. There was the crowd of last year and the crowd of the 1990's. There were the crowds of the 1960's and the crowds of 1910. There were the crowds of the 1800's and the 1700's. I found a perfect arrowhead at the tide line on Jekyll Island once and it told me, based on the style, that someone fished there almost 7000 years ago. I suppose beneath the sands, yet to be found, are rings and watches, coins and glasses that will yet be found to show that people of a present, now become a past, existed.

Nothing lasts and impermanence rules. That is one of the most difficult realities that humans tend to put out of their minds. You can look at a highway and muse on just how many people in their cars that they worked hard to pay for, have passed over it. The cars that today we would be proud to own again and to claim as classic, were right here, new and beautiful. This is where those '57 Chevy's, so coveted today, moved across the landscape. This is where cars, so cool and such a good memory for us, now lie in junk yards far from the showrooms and wax jobs of the past. An auto junkyard is filled with the stories of lives now over and material possessions now screaming back at us, as we drive by, "nothing lasts."

You might have a picture of yourself as a child and tell yourself that is you. But it is not you as you exist today. That child is gone. Literally every cell that made up the child in the picture has been replaced by growth and nothing of that original form exists. All that made up that child in the picture has left to become parts of other things on the planet and in the universe. Everything that makes up our present selves came, not that long ago, from elsewhere and from other life forms. The skin you have today is not the skin you had 30 days ago and the organs you have today are not made of the same molecules that formed them three years ago. Nothing stays the same. Because it happens undetected by us, we think the child in the picture is just the younger us. It is a younger template perhaps, but literally nothing that made up that child that was you, resides in your physical body today.

Thus religion declares that in this world there is nothing that is fixed and permanent. It does not take religion, however, to reveal that. Just live and it becomes painfully clear. Every thing is subject to change and alteration. "Decay is inherent in all component things," declared the Buddha and his followers accepted that existence was a flux, and a continuous becoming. There is nothing to disagree with. It is so.

Have you ever wondered at what is the chance that you are you? Or perhaps wonder that if you were never born, would you know you were someone else? Of course, we are here, but have no sense of being someone else that isn't here! But since we are here, we have to accept the price. We get sick sooner or later as cells no longer cooperate in how many more times they want to divide. We grow old no matter how good we think we looked back then. We cease to exist physically in any material form. And even the memory of us eventually passes. Only a few get remembered for thousands of years and usually if you met them, you'd find that most of what we heard was not quite so in reality.

Being alive is a unique experience. Being a conscious being is amazing when one considers the odds of being so. And so for a few short decades we get to filter the material world through five limited senses. It's no wonder some say " whatever a tree is, it is not Green." We don't see all there is to see or experience all there is to experience. We don't receive all the frequencies there are to receive. The material universe is frequencies that our senses change to comprehension. Our mind tricks us into thinking we are seeing what is "out there," but in fact, it is a movie that plays in our heads after the senses interpret what is "out there." It then does the math and projects the movie to give the sense of depth and "out there." Pretty strange, whether I understand it or not. If we received it all, it would flood the senses and we'd all be schizophrenic and confused.

I'd like to think we are all spirits trapped in a very limited five sensed, carbon based wetsuit for now. I suppose it's either that or we're hairless apes, which in fact we are in the origins of our form. Perhaps the plan of time has been to sculpt a hairless ape into a conscious observing human, and then move on to something more interesting.

However it plays out, the lesson of the Beach should not be lost on us. Live and Be in the conscious present. It is all we really have. The past is just thoughts between our ears and does not exist in reality. The past is generally the source of our anger and depression or even our pride and nostalgia for that which has past. But it is not real. The future, the source of much of our anxiety is not real either. While we can imagine a thousand scenarios, there is not much chance we can get it right. And if we thought we had gotten it right, we'd want to change it. It's like wanting to know "why" this or that is so. If we really knew why, we'd argue against that and ask "why does that have to be the why?" Sometimes "because" is the best answer after all.

So after a long day at the beach, go back in the morning. Try and find the evidence of the thousands who lived and played there the day before. Life is like that.

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