While on the Southern California coast for work a couple of weeks ago, I found myself with some free time, so I checked out a beach chair from the hotel and headed across Highway 1 to hang out with the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a midweek morning. Partly cloudy, breezy. The crowd is sparse.
Locals out for their morning walks, being acclimated to warmer temps, wear down vests and Patagonia windbreakers. But the mild air, with the tang of salt and impending fall, feels good on skin exposed by a swimsuit that gets too little use.
The low-slung chair’s architecture — splayed metal tube legs and sun-bleached wood armrests — defines a sense of shelter here, however temporary.
My usual companion for time alone is a book, but it’s nearly impossible to read on a screen in sunglasses and I failed to pack a paperback.
So, I’m just sitting.
Listening to the waves thunder in.
Watching brown pelicans swoop and circle, and suddenly tip fully vertical to dive.
Following the Marbled Godwits, as they pace and poke, poke, poke their long beaks into the wet sand, then scuttle away as the water rolls up to their delicate bird-bone feet, which look like strappy little heels when they’re running.
I get up and stand in the surf to feel the saltwater lick my toes, circle my ankles, splash my shins. The pull of the tide washes back out, dragging sand under my heels.
Ribbons of kelp dance in the water, lashed forward and tugged back again.
Settling back in my chair, I realize I’ve spent nearly two hours alone. Divorced from the need to interact with other humans. Essentially unoccupied. Unproductive, and unworried about it.
I’m awestruck by the fact that I can’t remember the last time I spent any length of time solely in my own company out in the world. That after the initial few minutes of self-consciousness while I scanned the beach for a place to park my chair, I’ve lost track of what anyone else is doing out here, I’ve forgotten to think about whether they’re watching me or not.
I’m happy, here in this moment, in an unfamiliarly quiet way.
I was looking for something on the benefits of alone time and found this bit in an old NYTimes piece that summed up why this interlude felt so powerful:
“Some people make their solitude experience entirely about other people,” Dr. [Thuy-vy] Nguyen [of Durham University] added. Research has shown that people often feel inhibited from enjoying activities alone, especially when they think others are watching them. Overestimating how much other people are paying attention to us, and worrying that we’re being judged, can stop us from doing things that would otherwise bring us joy.
And later in the piece, a word for the feeling my time on the sand satisfied:
Despite the social stigma and apprehension about spending time alone, it’s something our bodies crave. Similar to how loneliness describes being alone and wanting company, “aloneliness” can be used to describe the natural desire for solitude, Dr. [Robert] Coplan [a developmental psychologist and professor of psychology at Carleton University] said.
Do you ever feel “alonely”?
Here’s wishing you some quality solo time in the weeks ahead.
All the feels.
So sensitively, eloquently, sparely written.
Bravo!