Walking Into Myself

Issue 265

Miami, 2025

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Walking across the sand in Miami this past week left me with lightly sautéed feet. Crisped, or seared, you might say, after a plodding, soothing walk along the shoreline. In these moments the sky was glossy and blue and cloudless, the sun a roaring ball of fire. There was also a pleasant shove of hot air from the ocean. A salty breeze that lingered on my lips and polished my skin, with this heat, this choking, chest-tightening heat, perfectly agreeable at midday for me, because I must admit that I do enjoy, in some ways, when the sand comes with a sting, when the sun pierces my skin, when the ocean remains in my hair and is present in my exhales long after the day ends.

And in recent days—now that I am back from the beach, alas—I feel somehow different, somehow disjointed from my typical self, as if I’ve just opened my eyes and made a discovery, in a manner that feels almost childlike in its buoyancy. To say that I feel good after an invigorating week along the beach isn’t to say anything that profound, but I can’t help but compare my former and current self. What I feel right now doesn’t feel more authentic, it doesn’t feel realer, or truer, although it is distinct, even irreconcilable, from the self that I felt just a week earlier.

My curiosity about this transformation, about how I am one self in the morning and another at night, or that I have a different persona depending on my location, depending on the company that I keep, almost like I am a glass prism that reflects color differently depending on how you hold it against the light, might partly explain my admittedly peculiar enjoyment of feeling hot sand underneath my feet. Because it is in those moments, I believe, that I can exist in a liminal state, between two selves, experiencing both the current moment and a thrust toward something new. When the sand scalds my feet, it is a pain that I can’t help but savor. Instead of scurrying away, if I pause, exhale, and simply experience the windswept, oceanside flames, the moment is somehow ripe and, more than anything else, utterly alive.

Perhaps I could also stroll into a kitchen and place my hand on the stove to experience such a vertiginous sensation. But beside being incandescently stupid, I don’t think that would quite work. A transformation can be cultivated, it can be made more likely, but it can’t exactly be scheduled. I certainly didn’t plan on any beachside revelations, though I’d like to believe that I’m living in a way that makes these agitations of self possible. I think the key is to remain in touch with the present without distraction and to fully experience the embodied sensation of the world so that when you’re alongside the crashing waves and feeling the hot breeze slap your bare skin while you step across the sand you can, if you’re fortunate, become aware that there’s a richness in the air, that the world is a little crisper, a little more vibrant, than it was just a moment earlier.

Of course this is a dangerously fragile moment, a moment that can dissipate all too swiftly with the slightest distraction. If you’re thrust backward, away from this sensation, it’s like being startled awake from a dream that you can’t completely remember. You’ll lose what you’ve cultivated, you’ll lose the feeling of stepping toward something unexpected. And I believe that’s why noticing the richness of the moment is so important, as the overpowering heat, the gusts of wind, seem, somehow, more real when you’re attentive.

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Yet I wouldn’t want to convey any notion that this walk along the beach allowed me to feel some truer self. Although it may have felt that way, this is a feeling that I distrust, as I’ve always found the longstanding romantic ideal that you should fully inhabit your true self more than a little perplexing. The basic notion is that you should be authentic, that somewhere deep inside you is a molten, beating core, with desires and tastes and beliefs that shape the person that is you. Unfortunately, as goes this belief, society impinges, it molds you like clay, conforming you to a container, restraining your impulses, your nature, so that you can pay the rent and buy groceries and act in a way that’s conducive with the norms of your society. Rather than a swimmer who propels forward, fighting the current and waves for the direction that you desire, you’re more of a jellyfish, pushed around by the ocean. Thus the romantic ideal is to resist: find your true self, inhabit that self, express that self. But this seems to ignore such an obvious question. Which self?

At dawn on a sunny day along the beach, I’m one self; I’m another self during a quiet lunchtime discussion in a village; and I’m a completely different self at a crowded, boisterous table in a large city in the evening. This isn’t to mention the variations of self that occur when I have a cold or just after I’ve had a long swim or when I’m overtired or when I’m refreshed, even though all of those selves still, undeniably, feel intrinsic to me. What I do experience when I close my eyes and linger with the sensations is something much closer to a rolling, evolving, ever-fluctuating self.

Yet I do believe that you can cultivate your personality. That you can consciously shed your skin like a snake in the sun and adapt to a new environment. My sense is that many people believe this implicitly, though they don’t, oddly, act on this knowledge. They’re aware, after a week at the beach, or even just an afternoon under the sun, of how they feel different, somehow revivified, but that’s where it stops. To me, however, this seems worth pondering, worth obsessing over. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to cultivate? During conversations? In the morning? For the person you walk beside on the beach? And I do think that a long walk on the beach amid the salty air and underneath the sweltering sun while you inhale the ocean breeze is a perfect time to imagine something new.