Henry David Thoreau may have gone to the woods to pare down, to reconnect and to focus inwardly, but I go to the beach. I take off on a frigid Friday morning with two similarly minded companions and a trunk full of warm jackets, snacks and wine and head south.
We drive through freezing drizzle and heavy clouds and arrive early in the afternoon to wind-whipped palm trees and a slate gray river. Knowing the forecast, we left our swimsuits and flip-flops at home, so we are utterly content to crank the heat and burrow under blankets and listen to the wind as it sings through tree branches and lashes the water into white caps.
As you may imagine, I’ve brought a few books on our trip. One of them is Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea,” in which she chronicles a season she spent alone in a small cottage on the beach, far from civilization, in order to “search for a new pattern of living.” She was looking for more simplicity and less clutter, more purpose and less hurry. I’m hoping for similar things: direction and wisdom for my chosen vocation, a less frenzied mindset, space for creativity and quiet, and the ability to be present and undistracted in my relationships with my people at home.
I planned this little weekend getaway as just that — a getaway. A chance to step away from what has become an increasingly frenzied existence. The reasons for this current existence include, but are not limited to, COVID-19 and its tangled spider web of life-complications, possible new territory with my book-writing life, gray winter days, dog hair, missing library books and multiplication tables.
At any given moment of the day, all those things I just mentioned — plus so many more — are twisted together in my mind like a big plate of spaghetti. I need to work on a list of questions to ask my agent, but I’m also half expecting an email from the school saying my kid either has lice or COVID-19. (I hear both are going around, and I’m not sure which would be worse.)
I need to make dinner plans, but I also need to search the house for the missing library book that will soon start racking up overdue fines. I need to finish writing this article, but I’m also having to make summer camp plans, which is hard considering no one knows what this summer will bring, and — good grief — I need to vacuum up the dog-hair tumbleweeds.
Spaghetti is an entirely appropriate way to describe my mind. I hear men are able to better compartmentalize. I think my husband can. When he needs to focus on something, he focuses and finishes, then moves on to the next thing. And to be fair, maybe all women aren’t spaghetti. Maybe I’m just more spaghetti-ish than most.
I think Anne Morrow Lindbergh had a spaghetti mind like me. In “Gift from the Sea,” she says distraction is inherent in a woman’s life. “To be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass: husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.”
It’s important to note that she published these words in 1955. A woman’s life is very different now than it was almost seven decades ago. But I think some truth remains in her words, namely that deep-down need to find some sort of balance in the middle of that ever-turning wheel. “How difficult for us, then,” she writes, “to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives.” Amen, sister.
I don’t know if this one weekend getaway to the beach will provide me with the answers I’m looking for. I may even leave with more questions than I started with. But before I leave this place, I will bundle up in my warmest jacket and step out onto the ice-cold sand in my bare feet and walk the shoreline. I’ll look for shells and tiny sandpipers and coquina clams. I’ll settle my gaze on the far horizon, that clear blue line that doesn’t change no matter how many unknowns are jumbled together in my brain. I’ll pocket the sandy shells I just can’t leave behind, then I’ll brush my feet off and pack up my books and point my car north again. I’ll rejoin my family and my home and my life with a heart that’s full and grateful. And maybe there will be a little more balance among the wheel-spokes for having stepped away.
When I’m not writing about my family and our various shenanigans, I write novels and go to the grocery store. My novels are in stores (locally at Little Professor and Alabama Booksmith) and online. You can reach me by email at Lauren@LaurenKDenton.com, visit my website LaurenKDenton.com, or find me on Instagram @LaurenKDentonBooks or Facebook ~LaurenKDentonAuthor.
