Mapping the Gap

I’ve got a story about a wave. It takes place in Indonesia. It’s delayed in the posting because the impact has taken a little while to settle.

On a Tuesday in Lombok, we went with our Norwegian friends to a seaside restaurant for lunch and sat in slightly tilted seats in the sand. We ordered drinks and the usual mix of local and international foods. The kids started playing in the surf as they often do, engaging their massive playmate as any kids at the seaside would. They waited for each wave like one does for an imminent tickle without knowing exactly how the tickler will move in. Gauging the swell, waiting for the signal. The beautiful language of child and sea. Run? Dive? Too late- Bash! Smiles and whoops of glee. A shower of salty foam and sand. The spontaneity of the sea is so entertaining, the impact so enlivening to these little souls. It’s timeless and wholesome, wondrous and pure.  Seems like one of the few things like this left in the world.

But something was different this day.  The sea seemed heartless and vengeful to this mother of three fleshy, fragile forms.  As we drank our usual big bottles of beer in grimy koozies, my insides kept rising up with each cresting wave. I found myself franticly counting heads again and again.  While I observed what had become a routine scene of family recreation, my body seemed to be suffering an incessant and intolerable beating from within. There was an unfamiliar urgency mounting that almost ejected me out of my seat with each wham, a rising tide of something menacing that I could not quite understand. There was a suck and a slam to the surf that made me want to crawl out of my skin.

I looked at the kids with my mother danger detection system switched to red-hot, high-alert mode.  Scanning the scene, there was nil sign of concern in their movements or expressions.  Delight and ease was all I could see. I looked to my parent peers, searching their faces for any lines of shared distress. They looked normal. I reconsidered their judgement: a physician and successful financial guy.  Risk and consequence veterans.  Pass and pass. Their faces were only mildly more vigilant.  If that.

So, what to do?  I self-talked and attempted to soothe the beast within. I tried to manage the physical symptoms of my seemingly inappropriate distress. While my kids were having such a delightful, care-free time, painful bolts of warning were hotly scattering through my nervous system. Something was not right. I tried to push it away, following the signals of those around me. No chance. Was this a hormonal thing? Had I had too many coffees? Was I just a silly gal from the Midwest who is frightened by the might of the sea? What was this new vice-gripping fear?

I finally couldn’t take it any longer. I submitted to the screeching within. My friends were finding me very poor conversation, anyway, so I called in the kids to grumbles and groans and stopped hosting a war in my chest. We went home, and I cried. Probably partly because I felt stupid, but also because it had taken so much effort to watch my children play in those waves. It had been a muscle-clenching, mind-shredding physical effort to restrain myself from flying out of my chair and dragging them up the beach.  And for what?  When I walked in the door, I dropped our stuff, mumbled a greeting to my partner, and went to the bathroom to sob it all out.  It was a weird day. Fear doesn’t usually get the better of me. I went to bed confused and wondering what was wrong with me.

The next day, we all went back to the same restaurant for another lunch, me hoping the sea would be in better spirits. I warned the kids that wave-play might not be an option and prepped for a war with them instead of my Self.  When we arrived at the open air restaurant, the cement floor and furniture were dripping wet.  The stunned server girls informed us that a rogue, five-meter wave had just crashed into the restaurant. The almost-theft-proof heavy wooden chairs and tables that our families had occupied the day before were gone, either completely swallowed by the sea or broken in pieces ten meters down the shoreline. One chair had survived. The whole beach had just been slammed and swept clean. We stared, jaws dropped, at the aftermath of a wave that could have wholly altered the courses of lives. A day later. An hour earlier. All hail the flimsy and fatal nature of Time.

I still don’t know exactly what to make of this. I entertain no delusions of premonitions or predictive gifts. But Fear like that is unnative to me.  And a wave like that is eerily timed.  I don’t think a giggle of relief or a heart-felt prayer of thanks are in order.  I feel I should glean something more significant from this disturbing play out of events.  It smacks of a message one would be foolish to miss.  

I think it’s a lesson on intuition and our tendency to hush up our gut. It’s about inner “knowing” and the deference to outer contradictions we are so well trained to perform.  I think it’s about listening, about respect for the “knowing” of what one cannot possibly know.  It’s a lesson in not dishonouring that inner voice even when the rest of the world says so.  I’ll settle on that simple message and take with me the warning.  Next time I am prompted to movement by a guidance I don’t understand, I’ll trust this “knowing” is not wrong. And I’ll remember that the consequences of disowning one’s instincts could be quite full-on.

(More on Vietnam soon. I had to clear the pipeline of this experience.)