The Waves of Life
Jun 21 2009
The kids and I just got back from a fabulous beach vacation in South Padre, TX with some friends of mine. This was the first time I had ever been to a Texas beach and I’ve lived in Texas for a very, very long time. It was a really nice beach…certainly not better than the beaches I’ve seen in Cancun or Cozumel but perfect nonetheless for this week long trip.
We had a blast! We even made it to the small Schlitterbahn park there. I’ve mentioned Sandy Blanchard in several of my posts in the past. She’s the one that takes those fabulous nature/flower pictures that I use in my posts sometimes. To the left is a picture of our feet in the sand. 🙂
They also have two kids and our kids had a great time playing together. I’ve known them for almost 18 years now and there’s something about hanging out with people who know you, that makes things so easy. You can mostly be who you are and we can all laugh about ‘way back when’ before kids. I met Sandy’s husband, Jay, at a company we interned at back in the summer between our junior and senior years in college. They were high school sweethearts and still dating at the time. I remember laughing a lot with that group of interns and Jay always tried to pull one over on me with his ‘underwear sticking to walls’ apartment mess, but I got him good a time or two. Plus he reminded me he had to help me take my car to get fixed about 5 times that summer. It was a used car my dad had given me that turned out to be a lemon and turned me off of ever buying a Volkswagen. Sandy chaperoned us when I beat him at a drinking game at Bennigan’s restaurant (he’ll deny this one) and at a jalapeno eating game in another restaurant in front of his parents and my mom (he doesn’t deny this one).
On this trip, he and the boys were driving in one car and Sandy and I and the girls were in another. As we were pulling up to border patrol on our way back, he all of a sudden gets on the walkie talkie and starts saying things like “Aruni, make sure you throw that weed out the window right now. You don’t want to get caught.” I laughed and said something like “Oh no. I’m throwing it out the back window right now and you better hope they aren’t tapping into this wireless channel or we’ll all go to jail.” Fortunately, they weren’t tapping the lines, but they did ask us if we were US citizens and I had to tell them I wasn’t born in the US but I was a naturalized citizen, and that the crazy dude behind us had my son in his car. Of course Jay told me later he told the patrol guy he had no idea who we were. Then because we were laughing at our narrow escape, I had to play “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith and blast it through the walkie talkie so he could hear it. The walkie talkies on occasion made us sound like the teachers did on Charlie Brown and Jay would go around saying “wah, wogh, wao”…guess you just had to have been there. 😀
But back to the ocean, there is just something about the sound and motion of the waves that help put things in perspective. Seeing all the seashells and grains of sand reminded me of how we live in a blip of time and in a hundred years most of us will have been forgotten. Yet we stress and live like everything is so important when most big things in life are out of our control except for those things that are. We make choices every day and we choose whether or not to live a mediocre life and as Seth Godin, my favorite entrepreneurial, marketing blogger just posted:
On the road to mediocrity
Along the way, we settle.
We settle for something not quite right, or an outfit that isn’t our best look, or a job that doesn’t quite maximize our talents. We settle for relationships that don’t give us joy, or a website that’s, “good enough.”
The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.
You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.
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