Laughing in the Sand.
A woman past fifty falls face first on her way into the sea and laughs – and Bella asks who decided when our time is over.
A beach, a wait, and a stranger: a woman of fifty-something runs to the sea like a child, trips, and lands face first in the sand. What Bella notices is not the fall but what comes after – she gets up on her knees, sand from face to heels, and laughs.
Where she grew up, she writes, people past fifty or sixty tend to carry a sentence with them: we've had our time. Coming Alive names the same thing from the other side – aliveness is not something we add, it is something we stop blocking, and one of the things that blocks it is a story about ourselves taken as truth. Nothing on this site says it more plainly than the first principle: you are not behind and not too late. There is no race, at twenty or at seventy.
The two family asides at the end are hers, and they make the point better than any principle: the sixty-year-olds are out-running the thirty-year-olds.
Yesterday I was sitting on the beach waiting for my husband, and I see a woman of 50-something running happily across the sand toward the sea – and suddenly she goes down into the sand. Face first. In the moment I didn't even understand what had happened. Then her husband or a friend runs up, she gets up on her knees and laughs. She had simply run to the sea like a child, tripped and fallen. And there she is, sand from her face to her heels, on her knees and laughing.
And it got me thinking how different our mentalities are. I'm not arguing, times are changing, our "grandmas", let's say, aren't what they used to be, but you still notice it in people 50/60+: that feeling of well, we've had our time. In Europe, of course, it's completely different, age isn't even a topic. People enjoy themselves at 20 and at 70)
By the way, my husband's parents are 66+ and they're sportier than we are🥰
But credit where it's due, my parents, in their sixties, are way more active than us😂
Thank you for reading.
If her words reached somewhere mine don't – good. That's what this blog is for. Take what fits and leave the rest.
– Jan