Looking at Life: Run for the Wave

Photo: © 2009 Joanne Delabruere for Nan O'Brien

Our family vacationed in Cape May point, New Jersey every year, a tradition that had started with my grandparents. The summer of 1961, I was almost three years old. We drove to our family's shore house and after unloading the car, headed straight to the beach. My mother had put my six-year old sister, Jan, and me in matching red tank suits so we were easy to spot in the water, and had slathered us with suntan lotion to protect our young skin from the sun. I was so excited! This was the year I was allowed to go into the water's edge alone - under my parents' watchful eyes, of course.

I learned how to dive into the waves that year. My much wiser sister taught me the rules: first, she said, you had to stand on the mound of sand at the crest of the beach, leading down to the water. Next, she explained, you had to "choose" your wave by calling for it out loud - "that's my wave, the second big one coming," and the like. Jan, being the older sister, always got to pick her wave first. Then, she continued, you ran and dived head first into the water with your arms straight over your head, before surfacing and making your way back out of the swirling foam, up to the rise in the sand to do it all over again. We ran and dived into the water for what seemed hours that day, as my parents stood on the water's edge, carefully watching their little ones.

My sister had raced into a wave and I stood alone in the sand, watching, waiting, for the perfect wave, when suddenly I saw it! A big, rolling wave heading toward the shore.

"That's my wave!" I yelled to no one in particular, but wanting to play by the rules. 

I ran as hard and fast as my little legs could carry me. But, the closer I got to the wave, the bigger it got, looming up like a monster about to crash onto me! I suddenly realized that this wave was much bigger than I had planned on - I didn't want this wave at all, even though I had claimed it! Scared, I turned around just as I reached the water's edge, and tried to run back up the hill, to the safety of the sand, away from the powerful water reaching higher into the sky and lunging toward me.

I still remember the feeling as the power of the wave caught up with me, smacking me from behind, knocking me down, pulling me under, sand scraping my legs and salty water filling my mouth. I tumbled head over heels in the white froth at the edge of the beach, when suddenly I felt my father's hands pluck me from the swirling mass. He knelt down to my eye level as he gently wiped the sand and tears from my face. I was inconsolable, crying, shouting, sputtering, "I hate the ocean! I hate the waves! I'll never go in the ocean again!"

He smiled, knowingly, calming me down, holding me close, and then he looked me eye-to-eye as I continued to whimper. "Nan, let me tell you something. when you're running down the beach toward a wave, no matter how big it is, the worse thing you can do is turn around and try to outrun it - it will smack you from behind every time. What you need to do is run as hard and as fast as you can and dive right through the middle - and then you will come out the other side, safe."

As I grew up, I often thought of my father's words that beautiful, sunny day at the beach. So often in life we have a large wave looming in front of us and we want to turn away, run away from it, not deal with it. But inevitably, the things we avoid are the things that knock us down from behind - and we never see them coming.

Intuitively Yours,
Nan O'Brien