A Year of Gratitude – March 25, 2024

I spent some time this morning going through the photos from my trip to South Carolina earlier this year. There were photos of ocean sunsets and sunrises. I looked through dozens of photos I took from my visit to Brookgreen Gardens. I was lucky to have seen so many beautiful things while I was there.

Then I happened upon a series of photos I took of a day that I walked to the local pier. It was cloudy and grey that day. Fog rolled in with the tide and made the visibility so low that I could barely see the pier when we started walking towards it.

I knew it was there. I had seen it the few days before this foggy, grey day. I had to just set out in the direction of it and trust that we’d find it. It was windy to the point of sand blowing across my face, but I was determined to make it to the pier before turning back around.

We did make it to the pier. The wind calmed down a bit while I stood underneath it. The fog was still heavy. I couldn’t make out much on either side of the pier, but I stopped for a bit and watched the tide roll up through the tall legs of the pier above me.

That’s when I noticed the barnacles on the supports. Some of the supports had them sparsely on the wooden surface. Others seemed to not have an inch that wasn’t covered with them. I find them to be fascinating little creatures, so I walked around the wooden supports, taking them in while trying not to get my feet wet when the tide rolled in.

I thought about my determination to walk to this pier on a day when the wind was throwing sand in my face. I’m not sure why I had felt the need to go on that particular day. It wasn’t my last day there. I could have waited and hoped that the next day was sunny and calm so that I could enjoy the walk as well as the destination. But for some reason, I had been bound and determined to go on that day, damn the weather.

There was irony in me arriving at my destination to find barnacles waiting for me. They don’t go anywhere. They plant themselves on a spot like this pier support and stay there. They build their own shell to protect themselves from the elements. They wait for the tide to come in and then go back out. They just stay and adapt to the changing elements around them.

It struck me that neither mine nor the barnacle’s habit was a wise one. I should have contemplated my movement, the timing, and made the decision to wait for better weather before taking this walk. My face was cold and wind whipped and yet I needed to turn around and travel the same distance to return to my starting point.

These barnacles didn’t have to travel anywhere, but their habit of always staying in the same place is so perilous. Imagine being completely unable to decide that the place you inhabit is, well, uninhabitable. Imagine being unable to pick yourself up even with great difficulty, to look for a better place.

In reality, we don’t have to imagine. We’ve all found ourselves in a place that no longer suits us. It’s hard to imagine picking up and moving somewhere else either physically or emotionally. Many times, we don’t. We accept our station in life and try to make the most of it, try to just get by. Sometimes, we bravely decide to try something new whether that involves a small change or one of monumental proportions.

In either case, those changes can be frightening. They can be stressful and cause so much worry. The unknown can be terrifying even if we understand that what we are walking towards could be so much better than what we are leaving behind.

There’s only one way to find out and that’s to take one step at a time, to put one step in front of the other and keep walking forward. With any luck, the sun will come up and the wind will calm down long enough for you to open your eyes and see the beauty that lies ahead.

This post is part of our A Year of Gratitude Series. You can find the introduction, inspiration, and entire year’s gratitude’s posts here.