Nobody can belittle you if you have spent a lifetime living side by side with the ocean. For what is more humbling to the human experience than that? What’s my hotel room, the tiny space conquered by electrification, next to the enormity of the night ocean overlaid by the starry sky? Comparing the sky to the ocean, I learn that infinity has dimensions.
The people who live by the ocean know more. They know the worth of it all, and because of that they are kind people. They mean it when they smile, and they smile to each other often.
The ocean is mutable. It frowns at will, leaving me with only one option: to accept. What a mistake it is to think that accepting is the same as settling! Living side by side with the ocean, you learn that accepting is the same as being wise.
The sound of waves is random but it has its spellbinding rhythm, the rhythm of an irregular heart that will never stop beating. The ocean humbles but does not overpower. It doesn’t need to. Rather, it uplifts. It shows immortality as a natural, rustic concept. No church will ever compete. Which religions come from living side by side with the ocean? Which try to substitute for it?
What is kindness, anyway? Which trains the heart to acquire a truly generous disposition: the impeccable compliance with the agreement or the sincere apology for having to renege? The ocean hides the answer, but not deliberately: it’s just that we’re too self-assured.
The ocean is not presumptuous. It is not smart. It is simply multicolored and deep, so much that looking at it becomes addictive. Are we addicted because we want to solve the puzzle of unsophisticated depth?
The ocean challenges and teaches to be lazy at the same time. Sometimes being lazy is what it takes.
What else can you name that is equally quick to offer us both anxiety and peace of mind? What else can make our soul both surge in delight and fall in desperation? What else can turn us so easily into self-made philosophers while singing a loving lullaby to our vain attempts to grasp the meaning of things? What else separates so ably while offering similar experiences to those separated?
But most of all, the thoughts of kindness, immortality, depth and all that are funny. They are only borne by those pitiful ones who didn’t get to live side by side with the ocean. As for the lucky ones who did, they simply live there.