Walking on the Beach II

June 2010

The nature of beach walking on barrier islands — unless you circumnavigate the island which in this case would amount to a 15 mile stroll — is that it involves backtracking. I’ve never much liked backtracking. It feels redundant and somehow constricting. I used to bicycle a trail with a dear friend — 13.5 miles up and then back. We made it bearable with competition. How fast could we go? Could we beat our record today? On the other hand I don’t mind driving the same route over and over in the car but don’t enjoy overshooting an exit while travelling and having to go “backwards.”

As I reached my turnaround point this morning — determined solely by whim, I have no goals for my morning walk on the beach — I noticed that I felt a twinge at retracing my steps. My consciousness left the present — looking at the surf, enjoying the breeze and the feel of the sand upon my feet — and leapt ahead to my destination. Prior to turning around I had no goal; I was just walking. Now I could see the water tower near the condo in the far distance. I felt constrained and my delight in my walk began to wither.

I was, somehow, trapped by my destination. My freedom of movement had been curtailed. Freedom always makes me think about constraints. The best graphic designers I’ve worked with always welcome — perhaps with a grumble or two — the constraining parameters of an assignment, and expand their creativity and sense of freedom to meet those borders. The Desert Fathers embraced the constraints of their cells adding other harsher constraints, as need be. Thoreau’s cabin was a deliberate constraint on his freedom. A constraint that allowed him to think beyond orthodoxy.

I often think back on those years I spent without a car or TV; before personal computers and cell phones. I felt free then not just from the obligations and necessities of family and house holding but free from extraneous information — and of course from the burden of car ownership and maintenance. I had to keep my bicycles in good shape but I had the skills, more or less, to do that myself. Constraints accepted or chosen leading to a sense of freedom.

We talk a lot about freedom: everything from “they hate our freedom,” to the freedom of panty liners and bladder control drugs to choosing a family physician or a gas guzzling SUV. In some ways those freedoms are off the point, in others they are illusions created by consumerism. Not to say that having the choices we have in 21st Century America are not wonderful and important but that real freedom , it seems to me, does not involve choice as much as being. To have a dozen choices to whiten your tea-stained teeth begs the question of whether white teeth are important or not.

As I walked back, I struggled to recapture the present and to allow my focus to come back to right here, right now. And I struggled to free myself from the voice exhorting me to do just that. Until we can live consciously in the present we won’t be free as individuals, and our subverted need for that freedom will continue to provide us with the unsatisfying illusions of freedom that drive us to Target, Ikea, Amazon and better and better televisions with more and more channels.