Sitting on the porch listening to the waves crash, as Edna did in The Awakening by Kate Chopin, I genuinely couldn’t answer that question. Doing so would require slowing down just enough to catch the beauty in life before getting pulled away by the busyness of it. It would require staying in one place for an extended period of time. And your return on that invested time would be the simple joy of those few seconds when the sun meets the water. You have to train your brain to take the much needed time to do as you please and relax. It is definitely easier said than done, especially as a student-athlete post-finals. But resting is something that Edna is quite great at and taught me by example.

She didn’t need to be productive or even have a reason to become “overtaken” by sleep. So I naturally followed her lead and interpreted her actions as the permission I needed, yet rarely granted myself, to rest. I vividly remember taking the types of naps on the beach, that when you wake up, you forget where you are for a moment. My experience was similar to one of my favorite Edna moments with Robert. Edna asks, “How many years have I slept? The whole island seems changed … And when did our people from Grand Isle disappear from the Earth? (Chopin 32)”. Although she jokes with Robert in this instance, Edna tends to use rest as a form of resistance and the location in which she makes her boldest stances are at Grand Isle.

As a Redondo Beach native, I was always curious why I left the beach after watching the waves crash with such an innate sense of peace and power. My thoughts would drift and my problems would shift each visit, but I knew I would leave the beach with some type of clarity on the matter. Swinging on the porch bench reading Chopin, these feelings came up more often than not. But for the life of me, I could never put my finger on why these feelings of centeredness, yet strong conviction washed over me after my beach visits. It wasn’t until our seminar discussing the word liminal did I begin to understand my conundrum. My working definition of liminal post-seminar is the space between one thing ending and another beginning: symbolizing the edge of spiritual power and possibility.

Resting in the same setting as Edna, I quite literally tried my best to put my feet in her shoes as I walked along the sand of Grand Isle. I wonder if she reached the edge of this liminal space and felt the same sense of power and possibility. Consequently, I also wonder once she reached this awakened state of mind, how difficult it was to forcibly shift away from the peace and power Grand Isle offered her. At Grand Isle we learn that she combats the “habit” of “unthinkingly” going “through the daily treadmill of the life which has been portioned out to us”. We see this when she comes back from the beach to use rest as resistance. Her husband finds her in the hammock late at night and requests that she go inside the cottage, but she refuses.

Edna desires this same agency when she expresses, “I simply felt like going out, and I went out”. However, it does not translate well past Grand Isle. She continues to defy her husband and has little time for pleasantries and conversation with him. But even after buying her pigeon house, “having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual”, she still feels like a “lost soul” at other’s mercy. This is because societal norms weigh heavier outside of Grand Isle versus under the public eye where people work as if they were a “machine”. The same type of autonomy Edna enjoyed on the beach is regarded as childlike behavior amongst her friends in the city. For Edna to have things her own way, she would “have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, and the prejudices of others”. I even noticed that she rests less in the city and ultimately stops resisting at all. I think the constant restlessness she faced contributed to her suicide at the beach as well as continuously being at the mercy of the men in her life. She laughs in response to Robert, her true love, when he speaks of whether Leonce would allow him to become hers. She feels as though only she has the power and control to determine who she belongs to, which will be highly unlikely in her lifetime. All things considered, this is why I believe she turned to the mercy of Grand Isle, the only place that offered her peace and power. If she must be at the mercy of something, it might as well be “the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her”.

Thinking about my time at Grand Isle, I’m most appreciative of the rest Edna showed me which I cherished all over Grand Isle. I found rest on the beaches and the reclining chairs. I found it cutting up watermelon and sharing the slices amongst newfound friends on the porch swing. I found it in the relaxed multiple course meal we had at the Starfish restaurant. But most importantly, I found it listening to the waves crash while watching the sunset. And I hope we can all slow down just enough to catch more glimpses of this kind of beauty. So the next time someone asks, “When was the last time you watched the sunset?”… you’ll know.