Last week I took a trip to Eski Foça, a tranquil coastal town built around several small inlets.
While my husband worked, I spent Monday sitting on the beach, watching the sea. My friend and I jumped into the water and swam and swam and swam.
On Tuesday, a motorboat went to work anchoring a small pontoon to the sea floor a few yards from the shore where we were sitting.
Suddenly there was a destination.
We swam to the pontoon, climbed up on it, dove off. Swam around it, and swam back to shore.
On Wednesday we walked down to the beach to find they had roped off a section of the sea with buoys, effectively dividing the distance between shore and pontoon in half.
Suddenly there was a hurdle, and the pontoon looked further away than it had on Tuesday. Not only that, but we had to swim over the line of buoys to get to it making it seem more of a task.
After taking all of this in, I had to laugh. Was it not just Monday when there was nothing but the open sea in which we swam and swam and swam? Free to go in any direction we were called, uninhibited and untethered?
Why should the anchoring of a pontoon and a string of bobbing plastic suddenly change the game? Isn’t the open sea still in front of me?
When I was studying psychology in college, I took a class on perception and noted this statement from our textbook: “Edges abound, yet we do not see edges, we see objects!”
We see what we want to see. We see what we choose to see. We see what is important at the moment. But we should also step back and look critically, because I think what lays before us at all times is as open, abundant, and vast as the sea.
Barriers are illusions that we use when we need to, but when they stop serving us, it is time to dive in and swim in the unlimited possibilities before us.
