Typical natural process: Winter storms over the Pacific generate large wave systems that, upon reaching a shoreline, gouge out sands, moving them off-beach. Beaches narrow. Gentler wave regimes in the summer, upon reaching a shoreline, push the sands beachward. Beaches widen with a richness of sands. Many people familiar only with a summertime beach would probably ask where the sands had gone if they were to see a wintertime beach.
So, beach sands undergo changes the way seasonal beltlines change in an inverse proportion, stomachs expanding during winter inactivity until the Nutrisystem food box arrives just a couple of months before beach season opens. We’ve lived the cycle of inverse relationship between beach width and stomach girth. We know the process is cyclic, but of recent beaches have remained wider than usual, economically speaking.
The wide beaches of a relatively affluent lifestyle remained largely unaffected by a seasonal change like the flu. Then, unexpectedly, the wintertime storm of Covid-19 churned the waves of luxurious satiety and turned them into beach-gouging surf. All too suddenly, the beach of life narrowed. Wintertime inactivity settled over the land and people. Outside opportunities thinned, and the beach vendors found themselves without beachgoers.
For a people accustomed to life on a seemingly eternal beach, the loss of sands has been rather psychologically devastating. Mostly because affluence breeds impatience. Who has time to wait for a natural process to restore the expected status quo?
As in all things finite on a tilted planet that inexorably passes from season to season, the cycle will right itself eventually. The beaches will return, possibly as early as midsummer. People will, as they have always done after the passing of a storm season, resume their lifestyle, maybe this time with a little more awareness that seasons, though inexorable, can be anomalous. Mild winters and cool summers can occur; rare storms occur. And with those unpredictable changes in seasonal patterns, the sands of life will shift unexpectedly the habits and patterns of a people with short memories. Only a few in 2020 are alive who were alive in 1918 during the storm of the Spanish Flu at the end of a devastating world war, both events having robbed shorelines of almost all sands. And those who were alive then were too young to remember some image of the narrowed beaches of that time. For those of us born in ensuing generations, the event is a mere point in history that we might know intellectually but not experience emotionally. As we know, the next generation always has difficulty understanding the lives of the preceding generation. Five generations after the Spanish Flu killed tens of millions around the world, only the historically astute understand; yet, even they can’t “feel” what it was like to come upon that once wide beach to discover it had disappeared.
Enjoy wide beaches when you can; and when they disappear, know that their return is inevitable.
So, beach sands undergo changes the way seasonal beltlines change in an inverse proportion, stomachs expanding during winter inactivity until the Nutrisystem food box arrives just a couple of months before beach season opens. We’ve lived the cycle of inverse relationship between beach width and stomach girth. We know the process is cyclic, but of recent beaches have remained wider than usual, economically speaking.
The wide beaches of a relatively affluent lifestyle remained largely unaffected by a seasonal change like the flu. Then, unexpectedly, the wintertime storm of Covid-19 churned the waves of luxurious satiety and turned them into beach-gouging surf. All too suddenly, the beach of life narrowed. Wintertime inactivity settled over the land and people. Outside opportunities thinned, and the beach vendors found themselves without beachgoers.
For a people accustomed to life on a seemingly eternal beach, the loss of sands has been rather psychologically devastating. Mostly because affluence breeds impatience. Who has time to wait for a natural process to restore the expected status quo?
As in all things finite on a tilted planet that inexorably passes from season to season, the cycle will right itself eventually. The beaches will return, possibly as early as midsummer. People will, as they have always done after the passing of a storm season, resume their lifestyle, maybe this time with a little more awareness that seasons, though inexorable, can be anomalous. Mild winters and cool summers can occur; rare storms occur. And with those unpredictable changes in seasonal patterns, the sands of life will shift unexpectedly the habits and patterns of a people with short memories. Only a few in 2020 are alive who were alive in 1918 during the storm of the Spanish Flu at the end of a devastating world war, both events having robbed shorelines of almost all sands. And those who were alive then were too young to remember some image of the narrowed beaches of that time. For those of us born in ensuing generations, the event is a mere point in history that we might know intellectually but not experience emotionally. As we know, the next generation always has difficulty understanding the lives of the preceding generation. Five generations after the Spanish Flu killed tens of millions around the world, only the historically astute understand; yet, even they can’t “feel” what it was like to come upon that once wide beach to discover it had disappeared.
Enjoy wide beaches when you can; and when they disappear, know that their return is inevitable.
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