Rip Currents

I grew up in Florida near the coast, and I have spent most of my life here, so it only makes sense that I love the water. According to my dad, one of my first attempts at a full sentence was “to beach to water.”

Like me, one of my dearest friends (who happens to live on the other coast) tends to make sense of the world via metaphors, so when we were both navigating similarly difficult times in our lives, she said we were surfing, a metaphor I understood, though, in spite of my love of water, I’ve never surfed. We were catching the waves as they came, doing our best to stay upright, and knew how to swim if we got knocked off of our surfboards.

Lately, life has required a lot of surfing with change quickly coming at me in big waves, leaving me a bit unsteady.

I’m reminded that, not only is the ocean beautiful, it’s mysterious and dangerous, for the ocean is sublime, meaning that it fills us with awe due to its vastness and to all of the unknowns.

It is perhaps enough to know that, on my last visit to the beach, the shore was littered with jellyfish that had been stranded by the waves, and, yes, I’ve been stung by a jellyfish, and, yes, it really hurts.

I know there are stingrays. Gulf coast beaches have signs reminding us to do the “stingray shuffle” because stingrays will settle into the sand, and it’s possible to step on one inadvertently. I’ve not been stung by a stingray, but certainly I’ve seen them swimming. One time, I saw one that seemed half as big as me. I swam right toward it in awe until I remembered, oh, probably should give it space.

When I did an open-water swim race in the Gulf of Mexico, a volunteer paddled toward me in his kayak telling me I was going out too deep. I tried to correct my course, but I inadvertently started swimming out again. He corrected me once more. In spite of my best efforts, I was swimming too far out repeatedly. The third time that he came over, he yelled at me, saying, “There are fish bigger than you out there!” (There’s yet another metaphor in this story.)

And, of course, thanks to Steven Spielberg, we all know there are sharks. Merely seeing the poster for Jaws in the Boston Airport as a young girl made my daughter fear sharks — even as she also loves the water.

But, really, the greatest danger is an invisible one that leads to drowning deaths each year, particularly tourists unfamiliar with the peril: rip currents.

Rip currents will pull a swimmer out to deep water in an instant, and the force is inexorable. There is no way to swim successfully back to shore against a rip current. Doing so only exhausts swimmers, which is what leads to their drowning deaths.

However, rip currents are not inevitably deadly. There is a way to cope. Swimmers must not push back against the rip current, trying to return to where they were swept away. Instead, they must swim parallel to the shore out of the rip current. They can then swim back toward the shore. They won’t be back where they started, but they will once again have the ground under their feet.

This requires being alert and not panicking. It is, metaphorically, an extreme form of surfing and yet another instance of the need for mindfulness.

All of the change streaming through my life feels like a rip current, but my only option is to accept it, go with the current, and allow myself to come back to shore once the change has swept through. There is no way to return to where I am now, to block some of this unwelcome change. I am being pushed in a new direction — like it or not.

I could still stay on shore upon my return from these waters, if I want, and seemingly avoid danger, but then I would be giving up what I love.

So I will risk the water again. I’ll swim, get pulled too far out for comfort, and come back to a different place as a different self, accepting change, not fighting it, and not allowing myself to drown in a vain attempt to fight inevitable change.