TWO HAPPY CAMPERS

Agua Verde, Baja California Sur //

While Mark is outside drinking a cup of coffee this morning, Morgan comes by and gifts us with a bag of edamame pasta. She tells us this is a favorite food of hers, which makes it hard to accept, but she insists. At the time, her husband Marc is out snorkeling and yells out that he sees an octopus. This inspires Mark to grab his snorkel gear and get in right away. He comes back twenty minutes later, cold and unsuccessful at seeing an octopus for himself, but he enjoys the outing nonetheless. I tick a few work items off my list; it is Monday after all, and then settle into a book that Morgan gave me yesterday. (Our neighbors have been quite generous.) In between reading sessions, I enjoy some paddleboarding around the bay. Mark later does the same and returns with snacks from the tienda.  For dinner, I make a lemon garlic butter sauce to go with Morgan’s edamame pasta.  We eat well before the sun goes down so that we can be fed and cleaned up before social hour begins. When Dan settles in a chair at Marc & Morgan’s camp, we follow behind. Having cool people to get to know over the course of this last week has made this camp even better. Tomorrow, the five of us will depart and go our separate ways. I’m hopeful we’ll cross paths again sometime in the future.

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I initially jotted down the above notes with the intention of skipping this day and not sharing it at all (something I have yet to do). Sharing six straight days of simply reveling in paradise has started to feel repetitive, even pretentious. I’m not here to brag, and I certainly hope to not be a bore.   Shouldn’t there be some kind of challenge or insight to give a story substance?  But then I realized that a hidden challenge exists in a perfect week like this. That challenge being to recognize good fortune when you have it. 

On a long walk down the beach the other day, I caught my mind wandering towards hypothetical problems in the future and dwelling on things that have long since passed. There went my brain again on the hunt for something to stress about.  Then I snapped myself out of it.  I went on to picture myself in the future, sixty or seventy-year-old me in a state of reminiscence, recalling this week.  She might think something like “wow, those were the days when life was really, really good”.  When I imagined my elder self filled with nostalgia, I realized that I don’t want her next thought to be “I wish I’d known then how good we had it”. 

And so current me went on to engage my senses because I know that’s the only way to really deeply appreciate a place and embed it in my memory. I took in the smell of the salty air, I felt the coolness of the ocean breeze on my face, and the coarse sand beneath my feet. I then spent the rest of the week embracing our good fortune.

Life is filled with hardship and challenges; there’s no way around that.  But awe and wonder, love and kindness, ease and joy are also a part of life.  The trick in navigating the highs and lows is to know that the difficult times will pass and to appreciate the good times when they come.  Easier said than done, but a practice worth honing nonetheless.  

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