“No multitude of words could have been more significant than these moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first felt throbbings of desire.”
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
It’s a weird feeling to step back and see just how fast you’ve been living life; how easy it is to get used to the pattern of being overwhelmed, and then underwhelmed when that intensity is missing.
Before the trip, I was living off that intensity (it probably didn’t help that I went to a Paul McCartney concert the night before we left) and I don’t think I was ready to let go. The excitement of being busy is addictive, like anything in the right amount, and I simply was not going to sit on the beach and read a book uninterrupted.
But at the suggestion of relaxation, I tried. After our first seminar, I decided I wasn’t going to try and complete a checklist: go to the beach, go to this and that, etc. (at least not for the first day). So, I read, granted with the intent that I’d finish early and go and complete said checklist, but the kind of languidness of midday crept up on me and I just sat and read, just looking up at the beach whenever I felt like it.
While reading, it’s usually my goal to be distracted – for having been an avid reader in the past, my habits now are to expect interruptions, sometimes to hope that something will come up for me to avoid what I’m currently reading because it’s just too slow. But these interruptions almost blended into the book, at the beginning there was a specific moment where Robert and Edna were laughing at something that in retrospect, wasn’t really funny when retold, but they laughed anyway. I think I read that and just looked up at the beach to imagine that feeling that we’re all probably familiar with, and at the risk of sounding cliché, it was nice to kind of slip into that imagination. Something kind of dreamy even, where I was in this world, because I was.
And for the character of Edna, in all of her acute awareness of her own thoughts combined with the lethargy of the setting, I approached the same way I approached studying: I wanted to find a reason, a purpose, a feminist focus and create some grand idea that would be perfect to share. I sat and scribbled and concentrated, at times pretending to enjoy the scenery and contemplate, but really only looking up when a new idea wouldn’t come to me, and I had to work myself out of that. That it was okay, that I could find it all later, because it would happen no matter how much I sped up the process.
So I just kept to the idea of letting things happen to me. I’d read and let myself look up at a lime-green lizard with his strange little orange gill hopping from rung to rung, then opting for an easier path of the flat handrail (I would’ve loved to drop a picture of him, but I think I committed a little to hard to not doing anything and just watched him until he was too far away to take a picture :’)). Or at the blue shutters of the house across the way, one window with the shutters propped straight out and the other pushed gently to its left side. Really inconsequential, but it was there anyway.
But Edna’s journey of self-realization is about acting too– going beyond just thinking and feeling. Acting on impulses, taking the step first without the turmoil of overthinking.
So I finished my reading on the first day around 3 o’clock, and some people were sleeping or continuing to read, and I decided to walk alone. It wasn’t really on my list to things to do, but I just did it anyway. I took a walk to the beach by myself, stopping along the way to take pictures of flowers and taking some pretty unprofessional looking pictures of the sky and the beach, but it made me happy just to be able to capture it. People passed me by and I couldn’t care less, and I didn’t even want anyone to accompany me. I would’ve gladly had anyone join, but then, it was perfect. I walked across the street to Jo-Bob’s just to stay out for a bit longer, and came back. And just like that, it was enough; I’d had my fill. So I came back and lounged around for an hour with nothing in particular to do and nothing particular in mind.
I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. A year ago, a month ago even, I wouldn’t have gone out on my own. I would’ve sat and wanted, and never had the courage to go out and act on an impulse. And I wouldn’t have sat actively tried not to achieve some maximum potential I set for myself for the smallest tasks. So, yeah, it is kind of a wonderful thing to let go, to just rest. I don’t know how long I can sustain it, but Grand Isle was definitely the place to take a stab at it. I can have just as many thoughts and ambitions and strongly worded things to say as I did before, but time will let them play out.
“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.”
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
If Edna had the time to sit and laugh, to take a nap and have the time to find her own path of agency and self-discovery wherever she was, there might be time for me too.