On those rare days in beach world when I did not have to work in the evening I would stay late on the strand. My family’s apartment was 1 ½ blocks from the water. As a result it was nothing to come back to the apartment mid in late afternoon to have a snack. After a quick shuffle over Central Avenue and a couple of houses down Asbury I would just lay about inside out of the sun for a few minutes with an ice tea and the daily paper. The ice tea was a little different. Mom brewed it up from a southern brand Luzianne and she would dice up an entire orange into each gallon she’d brew.
After 15 minutes max I’d grab my towel and head back to the water’s edge. The sun would be dropping in the west but the air temperature would be in the low 80s on most of those summer days. In August it could be about 98 F even into early evening but August was a world until itself.
By the time I headed back to the beach in that warm but waning late afternoon light the day trippers (or we called them shoe-bees because they brought their lunches in shoe boxes) were streaming off the beach in droves. The wire waste baskets at the edge of the beach by the last service drive before the breakwater were filled a mile high with trash. With these easy pickings the seagulls were flying and screeching picking at dead fries and leftover sandwich pieces. A quick glance both ways up and down the beach and you saw maybe 10% of the people who had been there an hour before remained. These people were deeply tanned; these were the folks renting for the full season.
Making the weird schlop/klop noise that comes from cheap beach sandals I would walk across the hot sand. If the tide was going out I would grab a spot as close to the water as I could. Reaching the water’s edge I would lay my towel down, drop my sandals, t-shirt, glasses and hat and would jump in the ocean for a few moments of body surfing. With fewer people around me on the sand I would pull out one of the harder books I had picked for the summer and dive into it. It was easier to concentrate at that hour of the day.
The life guards were still on until six. Often I would get to watch them pack up their gear and leave. Beach beefcake and pinups, there were no ugly lifeguards. The people remaining after the guards left were mostly beach walkers. These were the folks that strolled for miles up and down the beach just to walk. I was a beach walker too but I would do it late in the evening with a pack of Marlboros in my beach shirt pocket. It takes a special talent to light a cigarette on a windy beach at night.
My favorite part of the day’s end was watching the light disappear. When you are looking at the Atlantic you don’t see brilliant colors from the sunset. You have to be on the other side of the island to see that. What you see is the color of the ocean changing. It goes from bright reflective blue, almost the image of a broken mirror, to a white gray to a dark green black over about two or so hours.
It is that shift to the point where the water is reflecting the pale light of mid twilight that I loved the best. I always thought I was as close to God and I ever would be at that time. Sometimes I would just walk out into the water and let my mind go blank just experienced the warm water and warm air and a complete lack of self. It wouldn’t last long but it was an amazing moment because even to this day I can remember the peace I felt.
Reading On Caring required me to go searching for a clearer meaning of one term actualization. If that isn’t psychological jargon speak what is? Getting an explanation of a key term was essential to mentally getting access to On Caring. The term actualization is really/kind of/sort of an adaptation of a guy named Maslow’s term self actualization. Self actualization is a wonky jargon word to express a real straightforward concept. Back then sorting out the phrase sent me to the used book store to look at psychology books (but not for too long or they want me to buy). This time I cribbed and tweaked the following off the Internet.
Maslow loosely defined self-actualization as "the full use of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.” He set this out in his book Motivation and Personality. Self-actualization is not a static but it is rather an ongoing process in which one's capacities are fully, creatively, and joyfully utilized. One of the sites I looked at implied this was a direct quote from Maslow himself, "I think of the self-actualizing person not as an ordinary person with something added. An actualizing person is an ordinary person with nothing taken away. The average person is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capacities"
Self-actualizing people see life clearly. They are less emotional, more objective and less likely to allow hopes, fears, or ego to distort their observations. Self-actualizing people are dedicated to other people, to vocations and to causes. Major characteristics of self-actualizing people include creativity, spontaneity, courage, growth and hard work. This is the tie to On Caring.
Lying on the beach sand waiting for the water to change to silver I tried to grok this.
No comments:
Post a Comment