The Turn of the Tide
| | Not long ago I came to one of those bleak periods that many of us encounter from time to time, |
a sudden drastic dip in the graph of living when everything goes stale and flat, energy wanes, and enthusiasm dies. The effect on my work was frightening. Every morning I would clench my teeth and mutter: "Today life will take on some of its old meaning. You've got to break through this thing. You've got to!"
| | But the barren days went by, and the paralysis grew worse. The time came when I knew I had |
to have help. The man I turned to was a doctor. Not a psychiatrist, just a doctor. He was older than I, and under his surface gruffness lay great wisdom and compassion. "I don't know what's wrong," I told him miserably, "but I just seem to have come to a dead end. Can you help me?"
"I don't know," he said slowly. He made a tent of his fingers and gazed at me thoughtfully for a long while. Then, abruptly, he asked, "Where were you happiest as a child?"
| | "As a child?" I echoed. "Why, at the beach, I suppose. We had a summer cottage there. We all |
loved it."
| | He looked out the window and watched the October leaves sifting down. "Are you capable of |
following instructions for a single day?"
| | "I think so," I said, ready to try anything. |
| | "All right. Here's what I want you to do." |
He told me to drive to the beach alone the following morning, arriving not later than nine o'clock. I could take some lunch; but I was not to read, write, listen to the radio, or talk to anyone. "In addition," he said, "I'll give you a prescription to be taken every three hours."
He then tore off fo
| ur prescription blanks, wrote a few words on each, folded them, numbered them, and handed them to |
me. "Take these at nine, twelve, three, and six."
"Are you serious?" I asked.
He gave a short bark of laughter. "You won’t think I’m joking when you get my bill!"
The next morning, with little faith, I drove to the beach. It was lonely, all right. A northeaster was blowing; the sea looked gray and angry
| . I sat in the car, the whole day stretching emptily before me. Then I took out the first of |
the folded slips of paper. On it was written: LISTEN CAREFULLY.
I stared at the two words. "Why," I thought, "the man must be mad." He had ruled out music and newscasts and human conversation. What else was there? I raised my head and I did listen. There were no sounds but the steady roar of the sea, the creaking cry of a gull, the drone of some aircraft high overhead. All these sounds were familiar. I got out of the car. A gust of wind slammed the do
| or with a sudden clap of sound. "Am I supposed to listen carefully to things like that?" I aske |
d myself.
| | I climbed a dune and looked out over the deserted beach. Here, the sea bellowed so loudly t |
hat all other sounds were lost. And yet, I
| thought suddenly, there must be sounds beneath |
| sounds—the soft rasp of drifting sand, the t |
iny wind whisperings in the dune grasses—if the listener got close enough to hear them.
On an impulse I ducked down and, feeling fairly ridiculous, thrust my head into a clump of sea oats. Here, I made a discovery: If you listen intently, there is a fractional moment in which every
| thing seems to pause, wait. In that instant of stillness, the racing thoughts halt. For a mom |
ent, when you truly listen for something outside yourself, you have to sile
| nce the clamorous voices withi |
I went back to the car and slid behind the wheel. LISTEN CAREFULLY
| . As I listened again to the deep growl of the sea, I found myself thinking about the white-fanged fu |
ry of its storms.
I thought of the lessons it had taught us as children. A certain amount of patience: you can't hurry the tides. A great deal of respect: the sea does not suffer fools gladly. An a
| wareness of the vast and mysterious interdependence of things: wind and tide and current, cal |
m and squall and hurricane, all combining to determine the paths of the birds above and the fish below. And the cleanness of it all, with every beach swept twice a day by the great broom of the sea. Sitting there, I realized I was thinking of things bigger than myself—and there was relief in that.
Even so, the mornin
| g passed slowly. The habit of hurling myself at a problem was so strong that I felt lost without |
it. Once, when I was wistfully eyeing the car radio, a phrase from Carlyle jumped into my head: "Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves."
By noon, the wind had polished the clouds out of the sky, and the sea had merry sparkle. I unfolded the second "prescription." And again I sat the
| re, half amused and half exasperated. Three words this time: TRY REACHING BACK. Back to what? |
To the past, obviously. But why, when all my worries concerned the present or the future?
I left the car and started tramping reflectively along the dunes. The doctor had sent me to the beach because it was a place of happy memories. Maybe that was what I was supposed to reach for: the wealth of happiness that lay half-forgotten behind me.
I decided to experiment: to work on these vague impressions as a painter would, retouching the colors, streng
| thening the outlines. I would choose specific incidents and recapture as many details as possib |
le. I would
| visualize people complete with dress and gestures. I would listen (carefully) for the exact |
sound of their voices, the echo of their
The tide was going out now, but the
| re was still thunder in the surf. So I chose |
to go back 20 years to the last fishing trip I made with my younger brother. (He died in the Pacific during World War II and was buried in the Philippines.) I found that if I closed my eyes and really tried, I could see him with amazing vividness, even the humor and eagerness in his
| eyes that far-off morning. In fact, I could see it all: the ivory scimitar of beach where we |
were fishing; the eastern sky smeared with sunrise; the great rollers crea
| ming in, stately and slow. I c |
| ould feel the backwash swirl warm around my knees, see the sudden arc of my brother's r |
| od as he struck a fish, hear his exultant yell. Piece by piece I rebuilt it, clear and unchanged unde |
r the transparent varnish of time. Then it was gone.
I sat up slowly. TRY REACHING BACK. Happy people were usually assured, confident people. If, then, you deliberately reached back and touched hap
| piness, might there not be released little flashes of power, tiny sources of strength? |
This second period of the day went more quickly. As the sun began its long slant down the sky, my mind ranged eagerly through the past, reliving some episodes, uncovering others that had been completely forgotten. For example, when I was around 13 and my brother 10, Father had promised to take us to the circus. But at lunch there was a phone call: Some urgent business required his attention downtown. We br
| aced ourselves for disappointment. Then we heard him say, "No, I won't be down. It'll have to wai |
t."
When he came back t
| o the table, Mother smiled. "The circus keeps coming back, you know." |
"I know," said Father. "But childhood doesn't."
Across all the years I remembered this and knew from the sudden glow of warmth that no kindness is ever wasted or ever completely lost.
By three o'clock, the tide was out and the sound of the waves was only a rhythmic whisper, like a giant breathing. I stayed in my sandy nest, feelin
| g relaxed and content—and a little complacent. The doctor's prescriptions, I thought, were ea |
sy to take.
But I was not prepared for the next one. This time, the three words were not a gentle suggestion. They sounded more like a command. REEXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES.
My first reaction was purely defensive. "There's nothing wrong with my motives," I said to myself. "I want to be successful—who doesn't? I want to have a certain amount of recognition—but so does everybody. I want more security than I've got—and why not?"
"Maybe," said a small voice
| somewhere inside my head, "those motives aren't good enough. Maybe that's the reason the wheel |
s have stop
I picked up a handful of sand and let it stream between my fingers. In the past, whenever my work went well, ther
| e had always been something spontaneous about i |
| t, something uncontrived, something free. Lat |
ely, it had been calculated, competent—and dead. Why? Because I had been looking past the job itself to the rewards I hoped it would bring. The work had ceased to be an end in itself, it had been merely a means to make money, pay bills. The sense of giving something, of helping peop
| le, of making a contribution, had been lost in a frantic clutch at security. |
In a flash of certainty, I saw that if one's motives are wrong, nothing can be right. It
| makes no difference whether yo |
| u are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a housewife—whatever. As long as |
| you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yours |
elf, you do it less well. This is a law as inexorable as gravity.
For a long time I sat there. Far out on the bar I heard the murmur of the surf change to a hollow roar as the tide turned. Behind m
| e the spears of light were almost horizontal. My time at the beach had almost run out, and I |
felt a grudging admiration for the doctor and the "prescriptions" he had so casually and cunningly devised. I saw, now, that in them was a therapeutic progression that might well be of value to anyone facing any difficulty.
LISTEN CAREFULLY: To calm a frantic mind, slow it down, shift the focus from inner problems to outer things.
TRY REACHING BACK: Since the human mind can hold but one idea at a t
| ime, you blot out present worry when you touch the happiness of the past. |
REEXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES: This was the hard core of the "treatment," this challenge to reappraise, to bring one's motives into alignment with one's capabilities and conscience. But the mind must be clear and receptive to do this—hence the six hours of quiet that went before.
The western sky was a blaze of crimson as I took out the last slip of paper. Six words this time. I walked slowly out on the beach. A few yards below the high water mark, I stopped and read the words again: WRITE YOUR TROUBLES ON THE SAND.
I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several
| words on the sand, one above the other. Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had wr |
itten my troubles on the sand. And the tide was coming in.
Source: Gordon, A. (1959). A day at
| the beach. Reader’s Digest. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved. |
What troubles, challenges, or stressors do you face right now to which these prescriptions might apply?
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