What a Night Walk on New Year’s Eve Had to Teach Me

I love visiting three places: the mountains, the beach, and the stars. Tonight on vacation, as I strode in the dark alone along the west coast Florida beach on New Year’s Eve (I invited my husband, but, consistent with his geriatric ways, he had already retired at 8:45pm), I contemplated why these places do such remarkable things to me. I concluded that it is their permanence. 

No matter my fretting and celebrating and tweeting and playing and laughter and sniffles, the sun rises and sets, the mountains reside in their majesty, the stars stick to their spots, the ocean stays put.

It is my proof of God and things quite a bit more long-lasting than me.

I normally walk the beach when it is not pitch black, so this jaunt was rare for two reasons: 1) I could hardly see my hand in front of me and 2) the silence and darkness were occasionally disrupted by New Years fireworks, spewing light and popping sound. 

But there was something else the night brought. I was soothed, as always, by the ebb and flow of the waves against my bare feet and lower calves, and this evening the ocean water became particularly white-laced against the sunless dark sand in each of its rises. Each shallow stretch for the beach brought a beautiful perimeter of bright white bubbles, but then - as quickly as that illuminating outline appeared so vibrant - it disappeared. White bubbles sucked into the hungry, dark sand below. Art made and vanished.

How many times did this presence of beauty, then disappearance, than reappearance of beauty happen while I walked for those thirty minutes? Seventy five, one hundred, two hundred times? 

We watched “Rocketman” last week and there is a line in the movie when Elton John’s songwriter wispily states to Elton prior to his parade onto stage, “Enjoy it while it lasts.” This was in the early stages of Elton’s success, when he and his song-writer pal had no notion of how his name would become a household one. The two shared a moment, identifying that they were well aware of their circumstances; they were either in the midst of short-fused fun or lasting success. Either way, they weren’t going to miss it. 

I suppose tonight I learned to appreciate both the temporal along with the permanent... that the ocean, as it turns out, is composed of both. For sure, it is a resource that never diminishes, deletes, or disappears; it is timeless. And yet it is composed of millions upon millions of disappearing acts, each time vanishing nearly the second they are created. 

I end 2019 recognizing both my insignificance - most of my acts are meaningless and gone the second they’re over - and my significance - the culmination of those acts compose a vast ocean of ebbing waves called Life. And while my little ole physical life isn’t permanent, the body of energy my acts dispense will stay. Just like the ocean. 

On the final stretch of my walk, an umbrella of colorful light spewed from a gunpowder-inspired BOOM in the night sky. As soon as its smoky outline faded, the sky (and stars) looked the same as they had before. 

I decided to enjoy it while it lasted.