The beach umbrella provided a perfect circle of shade, the waves rolled onto the shore, and the laughter and chatter of children carried on the ocean breeze.
I looked around at the amazing display of the human form around me, at the tanned, ghostly white, freckled, skinny, and fat; there were muscled bodies, flabby ones, and many in-between ones; I saw wrinkles, sagging bellies, frizzy hair, and bald heads; some people wore modest, sensible bathing suits, while others wore hardly anything at all.
The point is, everyone was more than their body!
A man with with a massive beer belly was comforting a crying toddler who had been knocked over by a wave; a pregnant woman sat under an umbrella wearing a sunflower hat, her twin daughters wearing matching hats were digging in the sand; a body builder, heavily muscled and deeply tanned, tip-toed on the hot sand with the gracefulness of a ballet dancer; a grandfather wearing socks and open-toed sandals watched his grandchildren playing a competitive game of bocce; a woman in her eighties pumped her arms as she walked past others half her age.
No one was perfect, but they were all beautiful.
I know I am not unique in saying that self-acceptance is a struggle for many and that it manifests itself in different phases of our lives. In our youth, a lot of that struggle was about wanting to measure up to the actress on the movie screen, the model in the magazine, or the friend who just lost ten pounds. Self-acceptance was all tied up with our yearning for a better future self. Then, as the years went by it was shocking to realize that, despite our best efforts, age catches up to us and now the struggle of self-acceptance originates from a deep-seated longing for time to stand still.
We want to be as we were in the past even as we struggle to hold on to who we are in the present.
Nothing can ever be what it was. The earth turns, the sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes, and the waves advance and recede. Life is too short to worry about tomorrow's sun when you are watching it rise today, or about the encroaching darkness when the moon peeks through the treetops, or about a gone wave when another is just arriving.
Don't wait for the music of tomorrow to dance when there is beach music playing today.
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