The Art of Digesting One's Experience

Where I'm from, May heralds the deep of spring: cold rains and riotously colored blossoms. Evening comes, and the sun lingers on and on. I think that was the hardest thing, at first, coming to Australia. Spring had been blossoming into summer—and suddenly, upon landing among the submergent coastlines of Sydney, at 4:30 PM, the light was gone. It was as though night were a blanket pulled over my eyes. No cold air to tell my body it was winter—just a daily, evening blindness.

Because there was no cold, and it didn’t feel like winter. So it came as a shock every afternoon when the sun was suddenly down so early. Jet-lagged and confused, for my first week here I’d fall asleep at this strange sunset, wake up an hour later, and step outside to a dazzle of silent, unfamiliar stars. Summertime, and the world was black.

Some adventures, your heart can embrace whole-heartedly and you can drink in every joy that serendipitously or synchronistically falls on your path—and others, you come out of feeling lucky to have your sanity. I had just come out of such a one. I nearly broke my mental and physical health doing martial arts training in extreme and emotionally toxic conditions in China. I was so taxed physically that I developed a hormonal disorder, and found myself in an environment where I couldn't escape from manipulative people with whom I lived and trained.

This was an adventure I had dreamed of doing since I was a child. What I found upon realizing this dream was a waking nightmare. The one bright spot in that five month hell was the man I fell in love with, a fellow student, whom I now followed to his homeland, Australia.

We were staying with his parents for a few weeks while we looked for an apartment. Their house sits at the edge of a lake. Two miles down the path, the lake touches the sea at a small opening aptly named, “The Entrance.” The waterfront is built up a bit, with a few coffee and lolly shops, a fish n’ chips place, a fountain, and a pelican feeding area. Following the opening south or crossing the bridge north, lie a series of beaches, each distinct in character and gorgeous.

At the house on the lake, I awoke at dawn, stepped outside, and watched the sun rise over the perfectly still water. Black swans glided in silence at the surface, but overhead a cacophony of magpies, lorikeets, and cormorants argued out their territory and relationship woes. I’d step back inside, make a cup of coffee, wrap a blanket around myself and sit on the couch, writing, writing, writing, trying to make sense of everything I’d experienced in the past six months. My martial arts training had come to a complete halt. I created, for myself, cocoons of stillness. I licked wounds.

A few weeks later, we found an apartment a minute’s walk from one of those southern-side beaches, and the man I had fallen in love with, whom I followed all the way here, started getting me out every day to the beach. I was hesitant, at first: Beaches are for dreaming, and I was sick of dreams. But how could I say no?

At first, we would walk along on cool, wet sands, talk in careful tones about casual things. We’d get coffee at the beachside shop, we’d people watch and dog watch, we’d get fish n’ chips and feed the chips to aggressive, yet endearing, seagulls. We explored rocks at low tide and looked for crabs in the crevices. I found a gold ring one day—lucky, and it felt weirdly fated. Sunset always caught us early, magnificent pink clouds a backdrop for pelicans on wing. All the while, my fallen dream hung around me like a fog.

Eventually, we started catching the tide going out, leaving behind mountains of seaweed and shells littered everywhere. The shells called to something deep within me, the shapes and colors becoming symbols for something more. This one had rings like Saturn; this one, a shimmering gold like a treasure; this one, spiraling out like a singular eye seeing clearly through the fog, something I needed desperately to learn how to do again. The soft colors, the shapes, the primal beauty of it all—the beginning-ness of these shells, these homes for creatures, compelled me to aspire to their simplicity. The roar of the waves compelled me to silence.

And soon, my beloved, the man I followed all the way here, began skimming stones.

The thing I love about this man is his unrelenting happiness. He has an emotional resilience I lack. We had taken to the habit of skimming stones in China, running off to a little pond down the road on breaks from training, to get away from the people who seemed bent on making life at the school hell. Now, on the endless beaches of the Central Coast, we were alone, windswept and free, teasing gorgeous rolling waves with our smooth, flat rocks. I had never been good at skipping stones, so I was lucky to get a skim here or there—he was brilliant at it, skipping stones such that they’d bounce in front of a wave and belly-flop over the back and then bounce thrice more.

At some point, watching him, watching those stones skim gloriously over the tidepool leaving a trail of ripples, I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and learn how to skim properly. He gave me tips and critiqued my technique until, by the end of our free hour, I was consistently getting one or two skims. That night, I dreamed that I skimmed a stone that arced into the air and skipped 16 times. I woke up utterly serene, like nothing was out of place in the world.

From that day, I looked forward to our beach walks—it became such a satisfying thing, to score four or five skims on a rock, or to have it bounce a great distance off the water. It was like archery or nailing the perfect high kick. I began to remember how good it felt to be physical again. Skimming rocks properly leaves an ache in your sides. You have to put your hips into it, flick your wrist with decision.

It’s an exertion of one’s influence on the environment, however small. It’s an act of creation: creating ripples, a visual effect, a hot-wire balance around the laws of physics, a sweet equilibrium of gravity and momentum.

After a traumatic situation, we close ourselves off to the world. Leaving China, I couldn’t experience what was in front of me anymore, even once the situation became peaceful again. I was so hurt, I couldn’t even be present in one of the most stunningly beautiful places I’d ever seen.

How do we digest our experience, especially our trauma?

Sometimes you find healing in the most unassuming acts.