12 June 2021
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—It was some years ago that I read a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace called “This is Water” that instilled in me a feeling that bubbled up again this morning during a walk on the beach. In his speech Wallace presents the situation of someone cutting you off on the road, and how the traditional reaction is maybe to honk or scream and to, you hope, send the offender into a dark and punishing place. Wallace asks you to, in the moment of frustration, to consider the possibility that the person who cut you off did so not because they lack the principles with which you yourself navigate the road, but because, just maybe, they’re rushing a loved one to the hospital. Now what this helps me see is that, even if it is indeed a case of assholery and not one of emergency, the possibility that goodness could be true creates a choice that I didn’t know I had. The choice is either to give in to darkness or to give in to compassion. Before, life was a book where the writer gave me but one option: read the next sentence or paragraph, because that’s all I wrote for you. But when you become aware of an alternative, life becomes not-so-scripted — it becomes like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The hard part for me is becoming aware that choice exists; but when I expand into the space of choice through awareness, it changes things, even if only subtly, like how my footsteps at the beach this morning changed the beach and also changed me. Grains of sand that were perhaps destined for the next wave are instead hitching a ride on my foot and making it a sparkling foot for the rest of the morning. The Universe is just different now.
Reading words or hearing them has the same effect as the glittering sand. After reading or listening you have sand grain words — some of them glittering, some that might glitter if you look at them the right way — that you never had before bespeckling your mind. And the fun part is that you don’t always know how cosmic entities like sand grains or words or memories or anything, really, will orbit back to you later in your life.
For instance, I didn’t know I could love a building the way I love Pacific Biological Laboratories in Monterey. I didn’t always love it, as I’m sure I saw it when I was a boy and my family would go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is right next door to the lab, and it was invisible to me then. It did not yet glitter.
The lab’s a ramshackle building and that’s part of why I love it. I love it, too, because it carries the soul of Ed Ricketts as I understand Ricketts through the prose of his close friend, John Steinbeck. I don’t like to pedestalize people, but I can’t deny the affection I have for Ricketts, who I feel understood the infinite web of choice and change that reveals meaning in glittering sand grains. Ricketts was a marine biologist who worked out of the ramshackle Pacific Biological Laboratories, and he wrote a book called Between Pacific Tides, which is to this day a go-to text for any student interested in tidal organisms on the western seaboard. I haven’t read the textbook but I know of it through Steinbeck’s work.
Walking on the beach this morning I saw a woman ahead of me, and I found myself judging her for staring at her phone, because the way I instinctively and perhaps subconsciously chose to read such an act is that the person’s dissociating from and uninterested in their current reality. But then Wallace’s speech appeared in me: Admit the possibility that…and then Ricketts via Steinbeck: …she’s reading Between Pacific Tides. And the sands in me shifted and in a way, I now loved this stranger, who now glittered. Even though the chances are probably low that she was reading that text, it doesn’t matter, for on my way back from Balboa Pier I saw the stranger again. She was crouching and taking a picture.
“Find something interesting?” I asked.
“There’re all these crabs coming out!” She exclaimed, and, indeed, there was a crab at her feet, and in that moment she became Ricketts and her phone was Pacific Biological Laboratories.
“Between the tides,” I said.
“Yeah!” She said, laughing.
I walked on.
“Have a good one,” she said.
“You, too.” 