I was walking alongside a beach on the Pacific Ocean and while being immersed in the sound of waves cresting into each other and into the shore, kept thinking about the relation between human beings and large bodies of water. We can’t tame them, we can live with them, we can swim, sail and surf, but we are also afraid of them. We build seawalls to protect our cities from them, we build giant cruise ships to enjoy our time while afloat in the same water. We come from water, we are mostly made of water ourselves.
I did not grow up around any large bodies of water. The first time I saw an ocean was in Jeddah in 2011, and by seeing, I mean hearing the sound of waves and smelling the ‘beach’ smell, since we got there in the middle of the night. My first time actually seeing an ocean was in 2015 when I got a chance to ride in a sailboat in Maine. Later, I got to dip my toes in the ocean during a brief visit to Miami Beach in 2017 (I don’t know how how swim, so didn’t got any further than dipping toes). It wasn’t until last year that I actually went a little deeper in an ocean, while visiting Virginia Beach. It was fun riding the waves and running from the big ones. Later in the year, I went to Hollywood beach in Florida and spent some more time alongside the waves. Being close to an ocean gives me a certain energy and calm that I cannot explain. A good friend of mine said that he gets this feeling from being in the mountains. Maybe because I spent so much time living in mountainous areas that I don’t feel that magic anymore.
I lived for two years next to the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston, and worked there for another two years, and wasn’t impressed by the beaches or water (it felt like lukewarm bathwater) much. Last year, I had an opportunity to permanently move to Virginia Beach and it was a really hard ‘No’ to say.