From my Notes App October 7th:
Today while surfing, I got out of the water after only an hour. My body was still paddling, but my mind had gone somewhere else entirely. Dislodged. Disconnected. It was like my spirit stayed bobbing out there in the lineup while I drifted back to shore on autopilot. I tried to ground myself… to feel the pull of the waves, the rotation of the earth beneath me, the steady inhale and exhale of the tide. None of it helped.
So I got out. Sat cross-legged on the sand. Let the ocean speak in that language it has, loud but wordless, and tried to meditate.
That’s when my thoughts began to unravel in directions I didn’t expect. Lately, I’ve been circling around some deep life questions, ones that feel heavier than usual. The kind that press on my chest and ask not what do you want, but who do you want to be. There are choices in front of me that feel monumental. ones that could bend the shape of my future. And there are choices behind me that I’ve been trying to release, but they still echo.
Somewhere in the stillness, a line from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius surfaced out of the chaos:
“We mortals also are lighted and extinguished.”
I don’t know why it landed so hard. Maybe because I’ve been trying, really trying, to practice gratitude. To actually choose joy where I can. To celebrate other people’s wins as freely as my own. But this line brought me back to something more primal than happiness. Something quieter.
We have beginnings and ends. So do the people we love. So do the seasons of our lives. Everything we experience, all the heartbreaks, the brief loves, the reinventions, they’re just the flicker in between. And for some reason, that feels both terrifying and comforting.
If before the start I was at peace, then maybe peace is where I return when it’s done. That thought sat heavy in me, but not in a dark way. It was more like recognition. The way the tide always comes back, no matter how far it pulls away.
Maybe the point of it all , the being “lighted”, isn’t to resist the extinguishing. Maybe it’s to live fully in the glow while we have it. To do and feel everything, except fear of the end.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a neat conclusion to these thoughts. They’re still tumbling around in my head. But I think there’s something true in letting yourself sit in the not-knowing. In trusting that peace isn’t something to chase. it’s something to return to.
So today, I’m leaving the beach without answers. Just sand in my hair, and weirdly in my ears, and that line still echoing in my head:
“We mortals also are lighted and extinguished.”