Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a simple man; the attention grabbing in-your-face flashiness of many of those foibles treasured by modern society are simply not for me. Seemingly not designed or intended to last, many of these complex, glittering fads soon lose their lustre and end up on the scrapheaps of time and memory long before they bear any real fruit or take on any kind of tangible significance.
To my mind, all that is good is most often worth waiting for, or borne by longer processes, one such example being the love of reading. Both avid readers, Rachel and I encouraged our daughter Elle to read and love books for their own sake from the time she was first able to grasp their pages. Hours of bedtime stories, silly voices and dramatic pauses between chapters have fostered my daughter’s devotion to the written word, one of the greatest gifts that I believe can be given, and she now possesses a personal library that almost surpasses my own.
Such simple gifts are often the most precious things because they are actually the most important things which, unfortunately, are all too easily forgotten or shouldered out of thought by the cuckoo offspring of day-to-day life: work demands, food shopping, cleaning, homework, tiredness; none of these things tend to last for very long, and rarely do they carry much import, yet they so readily swallow all our time and attention if we allow them, causing us to take the simple things for granted and to reach instead for the low-hanging fruit of what is rapid, accessible and time-efficient.
Instant gratification, however, is not the same as sudden gratification; there are indeed times when the sudden and unexpected have just as much ability to bestow, or at least to remind us of, the marvellous. This hot bath that’s been easing my aching joints now is not sudden, but as I get up to drain it, the small, abrasive gratings of countless grains of sand swirling in the water beneath me are each a tiny reminder of today’s wonders.
It’s been a long day. The end of term approaches, yet the end of the year’s work is still somewhat out of reach, a fact not helped by the oppressive humidity that spent all day pressing down upon my head and shoulders so that, when the day’s end came with the final bell, I felt like a tightly-coiled spring, bunched-up and ready to ping off erratically in any direction.
“Come on,” Rachel said to me as I arrived home.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going swimming. Put your shorts on.”
“Swimming? Now? Where?” I could feel the coils starting to bulge and wobble.
“We’re going to the beach. Come on, get changed – it’ll do you good!”
I was changed before I was wise, and ten minutes later we were stepping out of the car next to Aberavon beach, a beach that, although I live only a few minutes’ drive away and despite the fact that I fish it regularly, is somewhere I hadn’t been swimming in almost thirty years.
Instantly upon stepping from the car an onshore breeze carried the tang of salt air inland, and a few deep breaths soon cleared up the fuzzy head I’d been carrying around all day. I took off my sandals and stepped onto the sand to start our short journey over the dunes; the day’s latent heat, a day I’d missed due to being cooped up in the office, started to seep into my soles, that simple connection somehow rooting me and connecting me to the place with each soft, sifting step.
Down on the beach itself we dropped our bag and headed straight for the surf line. That first jolt of cold water slapping up our legs and onto our torsos was an electric charge enlivening and reviving us, our laughing and shrieking peeling away the years and restoring us to the youths we were when we were last immersed in these waters.
Deeper we ventured. Within a few short minutes our bodies began to acclimatise to the cold embrace of the sea. I dived under, into a green, soundless world of gentle undulations and the nudge of the tide, emerging then as a part of it, completely sealed in and removed from that other life that existed just the other side of the water’s edge. We floated, weightless, shrugging off all care and concern, drifting on our backs and staring up at the extremities of open sky above us. Pfffft. A long, drawn-out sigh escaped from between my lips, taking with it the last of the day’s stresses.
“Sorry!” I started to mutter the apology as soon as I felt my hand brush against someone. I stood up to make the apology properly only to realise that I hadn’t bumped into someone but something. First one, then two, then suddenly dozens of small jellyfish drifted past and around me. There they were on the surface and slightly beneath, their outlines beginning to blur gauzily into the water, and some deeper still, out of sight but whose presence was still felt as they bounced off my shins and carried on their way.
Another, palm-sized, specimen floated past, upside down, so I gently picked up the harmless moon jelly. Lacking a brain, a heart and even blood, these are the ultimate little drifters; here one tide and gone the next, they are already the ghosts of themselves, their short lifespans making them the mayfly of the sea. Even as I watched them, I knew that, come the morning tide, hundreds of them would garland the beach like little drops of dew, the only evidence of this great passing. I laid back and drifted along with them awhile longer.
Although sudden and unexpected, all the events of the afternoon, each and every simple gift that it brought my way, would, I knew, linger with me for some time to come. Thinking about them now, after the fact, I know, as I’ve always known, that these fleeting moments are what’s really important, and if we don’t grab them with both hands while we can they will soon disappear again from our lives like receding tides, a passing swarm of jellyfish or grains of sand disappearing down a plughole.
