Beach Walks: Life, Chaos, and the Order of the Universe

Every morning that I am on my boat, I jump out of bed and take a 30-minute walk on the beach before I do anything else. The surf, teaming seaside life, beautiful shoreline, and ever-changing scenery is both humbling and inspiring for me as a writer. 

The more I take these walks, the more I notice how much change takes place every day. Sure, the shoreline is the same, the islands 20 nautical miles out are the same, the jetties are the same. 

But the landscape is always different. Numerous footprints, only a few footprints. Smooth and clean where the tide has just gone out; jumbled seaweed, driftwood, when tide is down. Every so often the water reaches to the 6-foot sand cliff; other times it has left a large expanse of sand. 

The waves are sometimes large and crashing, other times they are medium and curling, and still other times they are slow and lapping. Yet each of those characteristics is slightly different each time it repeats. 

Occasionally, there are sea lions who have come up to shore. All sorts of sandpipers, oyster hunters, seagulls, crows, white egrets and more. Sometimes there a lot, sometimes they are not very many. 

Occasionally, a dead sea lion or seabird appears. Other animals and the sea slowly reclaim it. 

It struck me that this is a lot like life. While we think that things can be the same, day after day, they are not. Each day brings some slight change and some new thing, no matter how subtle it might be. Sometimes there is a massive change, the storms of life.

At first, I thought that this exemplifies chaos— one of my favorite literary themes to write about. It is never the same, and no one could track every change in the waves or the sand granules. But then I realized that order lies beneath all that apparent chaos. There is a reason why the waves are doing what they are doing today. Gravitational forces of the moon, weather patterns out at sea, temperature, and so many more things. 

Perhaps even the most brilliant scientists, working for hundreds of years, could never discover the myriad of reasons why something is different from one day to the next. 

Life can often be chaotic. The things that happen to us can seem random and meaningless. Yet I believe there is order beneath it. If so, then even through the chaotic times, we can trust that order will eventually win out. We are not mistakes, we are not random collections of atoms— we are meant to be part of the order that underlies the chaos. 

And the times when life is not chaotic, and maybe we are bored or burned out by sameness, we can open our eyes and see that everything is not the same. Every day brings new experiences, new opportunity, new encounters that we can embrace— even if they seem minuscule. 

Perhaps focusing on such things can help us to stop analyzing the past and fearing the future, and instead to enjoy the ever-changing chaos before us, confident that we are part of a larger order— the order of the Universe.