Ever since my first here, I’ve wanted to find a whole sand dollar. One intact, perfectly round, pristinely white sand dollar. That’s not too much to ask, right? So every day as Koda and I take our stroll I keep my eyes on the damp sand, looking for the telltale curve of delicate ivory.
Today, the beach was a necessity. With Koda, a travel mug full of calming coffee, and sand between my toes, I walked to achieve sanity and balance. The beach, uncrowded and cool, was the type of setting that matched my mood so perfectly it would have had my grade 12 English teacher jumping up and down in ecstasy yelling “can you see the pathetic fallacy??” (She really loved her literary devices…) The sky was dark, on the verge of rain that, besides a few stray drops, it managed to keep contained. The wind was strong and chaotic, blowing in all directions at once. The waves churned and crashed on the shore, as if releasing the pent up frustrations and furies of the day. And so, in the company of my pathetic fallacy, I walked.
I decided that today would be the day I would find my sand dollar. Today was the day I needed to find my sand dollar. Finding this elusive sand dollar would make the frustrations and life’s little annoyances fade to the background, and my foul mood would disappear. And so I searched. I looked purposefully and thoroughly, treading carefully in the sand and poking at anything white with my toes. Then when that didn’t pan out, I heeded the old advice that when you stop looking for something, that’s when you’ll find it. So I stopped looking. And guess what?
I didn’t find my sand dollar.
I know that’s not the answer you were expecting, but that’s the end result. I spent over an hour (days, weeks…) searching for my perfect sand dollar, and never found it. I was fully expecting to find it. I figured that I would stumble over it accidentally, a sign that perfection existed somewhere in this world, and that it was within my reach. I didn’t find what I was looking for.
But I realized something on that beach. Sometimes, even if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you stumble across something beautiful and unexpected. A piece of coral washed up on the sand, a deep orange shell so large it could be used as a drinking glass, a piece of a conch which, if intact, could very well be the size of your head. And all of a sudden it doesn’t matter that it isn’t round, or pristine white. It becomes special and perfect in its own way.
And I also realized that I was passing over beautiful shards of sand dollars, halves and quarters and three-quarters, just because they weren’t perfect. They weren’t complete. But maybe that is the beauty of sand dollars: while they are lovely and pure in their unflawed form, they show a fragility and weakness that other tougher shells don’t exhibit. They lose pieces of themselves along the way, sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot. Sometimes they lose so much that they are barely recognizable. But they are still beautiful, still perfect in their imperfections. Maybe, just maybe, they are waiting to be picked up, waiting for that one thing that will make them feel whole again.
Maybe that’s all we can hope for… to love our imperfections. To find what makes us feel whole.
Today I took a walk on the beach. Today, I feel better.
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