Sandcastles and Wanderlust

Castles in the Sky #45

I hate the beach. 

I am what you might call fair-skinned. I get a mild sunburn on my fifteen-minute commute to work. To go to the beach, I need to gear up like an astronaut leaving an airlock. 

I’m also what you might call fastidious. I hate dirtiness. As opposed to messiness, which is when things are not in the right place, dirtiness is when things are unclean. Sometimes my home or office is messy, but it is never dirty. Like, I might wear a wrinkled shirt or a mismatched outfit, but a tiny stain on a shirt that doesn’t come out in the wash means that the shirt is no use to me forever. One particularly aggressive form of dirtiness is sand–it gets everywhere and is very hard to clean. 

But my wife loves the beach. And I love my wife. And so on Sunday, we all went to the beach. 

I don’t want to be someone who hates the beach. And I don’t want to be someone who just tolerates it for my wife and daughter’s sake. So I was trying to figure out how I could learn to love going to the beach.  And I realized that unentangling this conundrum would bring me closer to another big question I’ve been contemplating for the last few years. 

The background of that question is that I’ve always wanted two things that seemed in conflict with one another. 

On one hand, I’ve always wanted to be a pillar of my community: to have deep roots where I live, to really get to know the place I’m in, to have a broad network of friends and acquaintances, to improve where I live, to get involved in good local causes, to be someone that neighbors can count on for fun and counsel, and to go to my final resting place knowing that through good ideas, hard work, and an open mind, some small piece of Earth was better because I was on it.

On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to be a globetrotting adventurer: to see all the great capitals of the world, to scale the peaks of the Himalayas, to take a canoe down the Amazon river, to read Dostoevsky onboard the Trans-Siberian railroad, to visit a Nollywood movie set, to have tea in Mumbai, hookah in Beirut, ceviche in Lima, and to share stories and laughs with dignitaries and cab drivers the world over. 

These are both highly aspirational, but to be honest, I’m much closer to the first than the second. With a daughter who’s only eighteen months old, I’ve already evolved into a pretty standard grilling-on-the-weekends American Dad. In my career, I have helped over 750 entrepreneurs from local, under-resourced communities start businesses. I am a member of a local church and treasurer for the board of trustees for the church and its associated school. I have strong opinions about which cafes and restaurants in each neighborhood are good. I get somewhat frequent phone calls for advice and for help moving. And I feel good about all these things. 

So, although I would only ever call myself a “pillar of my community” as a joke, I feel like continuing on my current path leads me that way. This wasn’t always the case. I spent two summers living in Latin America when I was 17 and 18. Then, when I was 22, with only one semester of Chinese and about $600, I moved to China where I lived for three years. So from 17-25 years old, it looked like “globetrotting adventurer” was how things were shaking out.

But when I was 26, I met a woman I love from my hometown, where we both have big families. And now I’m 35 and we own a home together, and have a daughter, and both have jobs where we help people and a huge family network. I wouldn’t trade anything for the life I have now.

Yet still, I get wanderlust. I crave the challenge of showing up somewhere new, clueless, and with only a foggy objective. I want the physical challenges, intellectual puzzles, and perspective changes that come from going somewhere completely foreign. In short, I want to adventure. Gaining more adventure without losing the beauty of the connected, settled life I have now is one of the major things that preoccupies my thoughts. 

I take time every Friday or Saturday to sketch out things I need to do, things I have scheduled, and what I want to write about for the upcoming week. This most recent Friday, having “go to beach” and “write about adventure” next to each other sparked something in me. I realized that I’ve always taken for granted that the type of adventure I want must come from travel. And so having adventure meant taking breaks from my settled life where I was building something. 

Slowly the idea blossomed in my mind that, perhaps adventure is not something I have to leave to do but a spirit I can bring to life every day. 

I’ve been surprised that there’s not an academic “theory of adventure,” or a generally agreed-upon idea of what makes an adventure. Everybody knows what adventure is, but you get a lot of different definitions when you start looking for one. The common theme between them seems to be notability, novelty, and adversity. Adventures shouldn’t be easy. There should be some difficulty and risk for the adventurer. They shouldn’t be routine. Following a routine is not an adventure, nor is a retreat to the familiar. And it should be hard–at least a little bit. 

And a question began to form in my mind: what if going to the beach could be an adventure? 

I’d done it so many times in my life, that I thought it was too familiar. But the truth is the beach isn’t that familiar to me. Growing up an hour away from the coast, I only have a basic idea of how to get there. I don’t know where to park. I don’t know what to bring. I don’t know what you do. I don’t know what makes a good trip to the beach versus a bad one. If a friend who knew me well ran into me unexpectedly at the beach, they would be shocked I was there.

So for me, a trip to the beach is only an hour's drive, but it’s got novelty, notability, and adversity. And so that’s how I’d treat it. This little day trip to the beach would be a baby step toward becoming a world-class adventurer. My adventures would get more notable, and more novel, with more adversity. But for the weekend, I needed to find my bathing suit and sunscreen, wash the cooler, and pack some peanut butter sandwiches. 

Here I would love to write a detailed play-by-play of our trip to the beach, but no matter how many times I try, I can’t make it something that would be compelling to someone else, because, to most people who go to the beach, it was an exceedingly normal trip. We drove a little farther south than normal so that we could drive right up on the shore. I had a lot of anxiety about this because it was only the second time I’d done it; the first time was before my daughter was born. I got our car stuck in some dunes and had to get pulled out by a friendly local with a tow strap in his truck. 

We spent the day there with my wife’s coworker and his family. We shared water and snacks, and they brought a pop-up canopy we put our four collapsible chairs under. I walked my daughter out to the water but she didn’t want to get in it, so she sat near the tide in my wife’s lap so that she could warm to the idea. I put on sunblock to the best of my ability and let myself relax. I went for a swim and sat down in the tide to show my daughter how the wet mud would drip through her fingers. We watched our kids build sandcastles together and wreck them. 

When we finished, we were all covered in sand. Since it was a “drive-up” beach, it didn’t have outdoor showers, and since I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t bring any extra clothes or water to rinse our stuff off in. On the way home, we stopped at a gas station where I was still soaked and mostly covered in sand. The sand wasn’t pleasant, but the trip was. 

I remembered sitting down in the tide with my daughter, with my shitless back fully exposed to the Sun, showing her how to play with the sand. I had a great time. I want to do it again. 

It was a subtle shift. Instead of getting anxious about something, I decided to try to get excited about it. Before, going to the beach was “a totally normal thing that I don’t like so it made me anxious.” I decided instead that going to the beach was a “novel, notable experience with some adversity.” And I had a great time. And I grew for it. 

The next trip will be even better because I was present enough to reflect on what was happening instead of wishing I was somewhere else. My wife had a great time and it was fun to see friends, and my daughter will grow up regularly taking fun trips to the beach. To outsiders, it may not seem like an “adventure,” but it taught me I can seek adventure everywhere, so now I can aim bigger. And isn’t that what adventure is all about? New experiences outside your comfort zone that broaden your horizons? 

It also taught me that I can adventure in increments, and that adventure is a skill as much as it’s a lifestyle. I didn’t like going to the local beach, but now I do. So maybe someday we can have a beach day in Rio de Janeiro or the Maldives. I talked to my wife about planning a trip to Colorado for hiking because I want to hike Machu Pichu, and I think Colorado is a safer first place to get altitude sickness. I started asking my friends if they want to rent canoes with me locally because I’m serious about that Amazon jungle trip someday. 

But even if these increments don’t scale up to something bigger, I’m happy that I can bring this sense of adventure to my everyday life. Because in the end, that’s what an adventure is: doing something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, then letting yourself be transformed by it. 

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