What I should have done

It has been ten long days since I have hit publish, ten long days since I have made any words public. In the first two or three of those days, I was writing a lot down but hated it all. Eventually, on a plane ride to Florida, I gave myself time to address my discontent for what I had written. Reading over my catscratch and tangents, I decided that writing made me feel selfish

Writing - writing anything - is not a form of creating something new. Writing means taking thoughts that have been influenced and molded by other people and claiming them as your own. Writing claims that I know enough about something to form words to describe it. Even if what is being written is filled with uncertainty, it tries to defend that uncertainty as true and mine. I don't deserve to try to make sense of things because I don't know anything.

So, lying on the beach the past weekend, I decided to read instead of write. Reading felt selfless because it required me to look into the thoughts of someone else and take them for what they were. Reading meant acknowledging that someone else , the author, knew a lot more than I did about whatever I was reading and it meant that I was small enough to need someone else to tell me things. Reading was fun because it made feeling selfless easy.

But, as my trip came to an end and my friends and I walked onto the beach for one last time, I wished I had never read at all. The beach was too windy for us and, for the fifteen seconds that I tried to bare it, whipping sand blinded me from looking at it. I longed to be back on that beach ad when I tried to picture it in my head, all I could see was the backdrop it created behind my book. Reading may be less selfish than writing, but doing anything on a beach besides looking at it is vain and wrong.

I should have put my book down and used those hands to feel the coarseness of sand. I should have lifted my eyes from the page and let them try to find an end of the horizon. I should have taken my headphones out and listened for the winds end. I should have uncrossed my legs and explored every inch of what was around me. I spent four days on the beach, I should know its colors and smells and textures. Instead, I know 129 pages of what Ernest Hemingway told me.

Being on a beach - frankly being anywhere - is amazing and humbling. Choosing any distraction, be it writing, reading, playing music, talking to friends, praying, sleeping, texting, or playing papi, is insulting and embarrassing. A location should never be a backdrop, not even to thoughts that we think are important. Nothing is as awe-inducing as where we are at any given moment and nothing deserves to be the center of our unbiased thoughts more than wherever it is we find ourselves. I wish I would have felt this way at the beginning of my trip.