When I was young, my dad used to wake us up early every morning to run along the beach. He’d run and us kids would walk, dragging our feet and complaining about not getting to sleep in. Since this was only possible when we were on an island – Penang, usually – we didn’t have to do it too often.
At the time, the only thing we hated more than getting dragged out of bed was having to make the annual family pilgrimage to Penang in the first place, so it’s funny that I now have a special love for the beach. Not for suntanning or people-watching or whatever else you may associate with going to the beach, but for the sand and the open skies and the way the ocean’s waves lap at its edges.
I love wading into the waves, I love walking along the water’s edge and staring out to sea. There’s a certain majesty and, at the same time, a peaceful calm to the beach. You sense the ferocious strength that lurks beneath the gentle surface of the water, and the unseen powers that moulded the ocean and created the skies in the first place.
The beach gives me perspective, reminds me how small I am in the scheme and beauty of everything else, gives me the chance to quiet my heart and my mind, and turns my eyes to the Creator of it all. It rights everything inside in a way that few other things can.
Y understands that I love the beach, even though it doesn’t do for him what it does for me. But he remembers my need to go barefoot in the sand, to walk in the shallows and feel the waves, and to take a moment to breathe in the open space. It’s probably the one place Mr. Long Legs doesn’t hurry me and tell me I’m walking too slowly. Even though I am, incredibly so. See the two guys in boardshorts walking ahead in the photo? That’s Y with Mark.
