What is it About the Ocean?

I don’t like to be left alone with my thoughts. That is a recipe for disaster. Especially at the moment with everything that has been happening around me. But I’ve just moved to a place (albeit temporarily) right by the ocean. It’s literally about a four-minute walk, and you’re on the beach. I have been having a lot of what I can only assume are stress-related headaches recently. Usually, stress goes straight to my stomach. This time, it has gone to my head. And nothing gets rid of a headache faster than a walk on the beach, not for me anyway. But the trouble is walking along the beach just makes you naturally pensive. I start thinking about things that I have no business thinking about.

I don’t want to think about these things. I want to bury them in the back of my mind until I am forced to confront them. I want to ignore my problems like an adult, God damn it! But the second I step on the beach, boom. It all comes flooding into my brain. And it’s not just me. The second my husband steps on the beach with me, he does the same thing. We could be talking about how the seagulls are organising. We set foot onto the beach, and suddenly we are talking about the inevitability of death. What is it about the beach or the ocean that makes us so pensive? Is it the vast expanding nature of it? The unknown? Being close to something so very powerful?

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