Pleasure Magnet
There’s an energy on the beach – joy, optimism, playfulness, thankfulness, and wonder.
This is why beaches are pleasure magnets. How often have you seen angry, anxious, and sad people at a beach? Rarely in my many years of beachgoing.
The attraction of the beach isn’t to cool down, swim or lie in the sun, as comforting as those may be. The attraction is the promise of simply being.
“Why is it that I can’t sit on my porch and relax, but I can sit on the beach all afternoon?” a friend asks.
The beach has magical powers, one of which is stillness.
Another is gratitude.
“We’ll remember this day all winter,” my sisters say as we sit in our low beach chairs, facing west on a September day. Our bathing suits are wet, our faces are slobbered with lotion, and our toes are dug into the sand. We watch the tide go out with each wave, exposing sandbars.
It’s not like we’re on some remote, exotic beach on St. John or the Outer Banks. We are crowded into this speck of beach with many others. Toddlers eat sand, elderly women wade into the ocean with their walkers, teenagers splash and flirt with each other, harried parents plop down with blankets and coolers, exhaling as their bodies unwind before us.
There is no other place any of us crammed into this beach wants to be. Eighty degrees in September? Water warmer than it has been all summer? Plenty of parking spaces because the summer people have left? No wind or blowing sand? A beauty of a sunset in a few hours?
This, this, this.
Some read. Some stroll. Others nap. Many quietly talk about the little things in life – new TV series, restaurant openings, tomorrow’s weather, rumors about a Trader Joe’s.
There are no loud radios, raised voices, or tensed faces. The beach has wrapped us all in her warmth and tidal rhythm.
In weeks, the weather will turn – gale winds, damp, cold air, overcast days.
Some will continue to come to this beach to walk. Their bodies will bend at 45-degree angles to hide their faces from the frigid wind. The happy beach chatter will have evaporated.
But today. Today, we bounce around in the waves, agreeing that the water feels warmer than the air.
“Let’s never get out!”
This day.
This beach.
This gathering of strangers soaking in the gloriousness of a beach day.