Enjoying the View
Considering I've lived just a few blocks from the ocean for the past several years, it is perhaps a bit disgraceful that I've spent so little time at the beach. It's safe to say the novelty wore off relatively quickly, and equally quickly my life became full with new friends and pursuits that cut into my beach time. (I also write books. Have I mentioned that?) I can think of other reasons, too. My fair skin that burns easily, the incessant and annoying tourists that crowd this little beach town between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and, of course, COVID-19. But it's there, the ocean. And every time I see it, I have to remind myself that it's real. That I live here.
Another rather disgraceful fact about living here is that I don't leave my little beach town all that often. I'm not really talking about vacations or work trips, which are a regular part of my life. But when I'm in town, I rarely hop over to the next town, or the next after that, or to any number of the seaside communities that surround me. My life is here, my office is here, and I just don't find myself exploring very much, certainly not as much as I used to. You can blame part of this on COVID-19 as well, but you can also blame part (read: most) of it on me just being lazy. It's simply easier to stay put. (Plus, traffic. You cannot underestimate it.)
And so I've been trying to explore a bit more lately, putting a few miles on my car and seeing corners of my community that are new to me. It probably seems simple to you, but especially after a year of largely staying at home due to the pandemic, it can be a strangely powerful feeling to be driving down a road and realize that you've never been there before. (Even more strange if the road is, hypothetically, only a few miles from your house.) Last weekend I visited a city a few hours north and spent some time appreciating the same ocean, just on a different stretch of shoreline, and it filled me with a rather unique sense of happiness. One that I think stems from knowing there is so much world left for us to explore, and that most of the time we don't have to go very far to find it.