It finally stopped raining last weekend. (The locals swear they’ve never seen a year this wet.) Naturally, we packed our beach bags, cleaned out the fridge and proclaimed it a picnic! then hightailed it out of the house to what many have described as:

The most beautiful beach in the world…

The water was stunning. Always is. Pelicans swooped and palms danced and clouds drifted dreamily, as usual.

The kids bolted for the waves, we made camp, made cozy, made furniture…

Then for safety’s sake, plowed a path from our picnic to the water…

Before I continue, before your emotions pull you under like the tide, I have a request of you:

Open back up. Any hopelessness or fear or frustration you felt from the very first photo? Let it go.

Just breathe for a minute. Drop the judgements, any stories, all the anger. You can pick them back up at the end of this post if you want, but for now, let’s just stay…curious.

Better?

By far, the most common reaction I hear from vacationers who explore this region’s beaches (beyond those manicured every morning) is:

“Wow. How sad.”

And while I get it (such reactions are easy, after all), I’ve been questioning the usefulness of this kind of thinking lately. Its usefulness to me, to our planet and to our perception of the “problems” themselves.

Here’s what I wonder:

At what point does the situation become sad?

When our waste washes up en masse? Or when the very first bottle cap landed on foreign soil and foretold the plastic pilgrimage to come?

Why don’t I feel the same sadness while making dinner/buckling her seatbelt/watching them color?

Why does it hurt more when I toss something than when I first select it from rows of prettily packaged promises?

Was it sad while being hugged by a small child, or not until it washed up dismembered, the embrace left behind leagues ago?

Is it sadder that corporations are not held accountable or that we don’t always hold ourselves to the highest of standards?

Is the greater brokenness within our systems or within the peoples’ hearts who create them?

Mostly, I ask myself (and now you):

Of what benefit is it to observe the consequences of our choices — choices we’ve all benefitted from in some way — and attach negative labels to them? 

Why is it that when we see trash washed ashore, for example, we don’t feel gratitude for the experiences and enrichment it represents?

{Keep breathing. They’re just questions.}

A yoga teacher of mine once said that a negative emotion should only be held for 90 seconds before we begin to release it. That 90 seconds is enough time for it to serve its purpose: steering us away from harm and toward our deepest truth.

In this light, whether we settle into the sadness or allow it to guide us toward something greater (deeper truth, higher consciousness, bliss, the image of God — choose your flavor), is entirely up to us and ultimately determines our effectiveness in creating change.

In fact, settling for sadness without digging deeper to the lessons beneath it seems remarkably similar to dumping our waste in the ocean. It’s like saying, “I don’t know where else to put it,” and tossing it somewhere so vast that its significance seems somehow lessened. Thing is, life doesn’t actually work that way. Waste, whether literal or figurative, simply moves about and resurfaces again somewhere else.

Cumulative negative emotions are no less toxic to our consciousness than cumulative plastic is to the planet.

And as Eckhart Tolle reminds us, consciousness counts:

“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.”

So the same must apply to our collective consciousness. Meaning, the stories we tell ourselves as a species matter, too.

• What if instead of holding onto the story that we’re destroying the planet, we act as if we just arrived here and simply work with what we see before us, correcting evermore intuitively.
• What if we observed the world not with judgement and fear, but curiosity and creativity?
• What if we approach the world’s “problems” as we do artistic endeavors or true love or a game for which we’re conditioned, instead of impossibly enormous tragedies to be averted?

Fortunately, we need not look far for examples of this exact distinction in thinking. In the absence of judgement, children have no problem:

Discovering treasures…

Seeing potential…

Making do…

Envisioning opportunity…

And figuring shit out…

Kids aren’t wired to see tragedy. They’re wired to see possibility.

I can’t help but think that if we had half their curiosity and half our own fear and judgement, we’d be solving these dilemmas twice as fast.

I don’t have all the answers. No one else does, either. But I don’t really think answers are what we need right now. I think what we need are bigger and deeper questions.

About the reasons we’ve become so complacent and detached from the very life force that sustains us.

About the relevance of negative thoughts given ever-present abundance.

About the effectiveness of fear vs. compassion and empathy.

About the roots and the fruits of judgement.

About what coming generations truly need from us.

Yesterday, as I was wrapping up this post and contemplating its ending, I ran across an article about a guy named Wade Davis and was delighted to have found a kindred wanderer/ponderer.

A world renowned anthropologist and explorer, Wade writes,

“The world is not dying. It’s not falling apart. It’s changing. What young generation has ever come into its own in a world free of peril?…I personally believe that pessimism is an indulgence, despair an insult to the imagination. There are wonderfully positive things out there…I tire of those who fuel the flames of fear.”

Me too, Wade. You and me and so many others.

Tulum’s beaches are still beyond beautiful. You can still come here and see paradise exactly as it’s painted on the postcards. But to those of you who can handle it, to those whose hearts are whole enough to bear yet another break, I encourage you to get off the beaten path, see what paradise actually looks like (in your neck of the woods, for starters) and accept it exactly the way it is. Then, after 90 seconds, take your sadness and release it to the sea.

Of course, you don’t have to. Just like you don’t have to refrain from tossing your trash to the tide.

“The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance