So here we are at Barry Island, a favourite place for people to go for a walk. Like most when I set out for this beach, I have no idea whether the tide will be in or out. Barry is one of those places with a very high tidal range, so when ‘in’, the sea is often squashing the beach up to the promenade wall and when it is ‘out’, it is several hundred yards away, almost stretching across to the other side of the Bristol Channel.
On this day, the tide was right out, some people were walking and as always, the seagulls were present. One family of young children were playing in the sand with their father and even though he was wearing his clothes, he willingly lay in the hole they had dug and they buried him in sand, his head propped up with a toy bucket. As children do, they then left their father and became interested in something else and it looked as if he was just lying quietly in the sand, dozing. This is the image. Just the ordinary things that go on at the beach when the tide is out.
At low tide
the habits of the sands
continue
Doing the ordinary and being ordinary is something that we can struggle against, for we all have ways of avoiding our ordinariness. It is as if the acceptance of our ordinariness and the ordinary process of our living represent giving up or in some way, failure. We tend to include the ordinary qualities of ourselves amongst those things we class as not worthwhile. We want to put these things behind us. We try to create situations in which we can feel special and in which our experience is somehow extraordinary, as if it is stimulation and attention that will give us life. In fact, our living is the very stuff of our ordinariness. How we deal with our problems and worries in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way is a part of our life. Indeed, it is our life and it is in the process of living our life in an open, aware and mindful manner that brings its own unique extraordinary quality.
Barry Magid says,
“…minds are as vast and boundless as the empty sky. There is no limit to the number of clouds that sky can contain. A mind that no longer seeks to transcend itself or hopes to banish the clouds from the sky - a mind that allows itself to be ordinary - is special indeed.”
