Do you remember the best day of your life?
Many people answer this question with a nostalgic throwback to the “good ole’ days” of youth. I think, perhaps, because it is the only time in our lives when we don’t care. Even if we are feeling scared, anxious, preoccupied, we are far less likely to let those feelings make decisions for us. We live with a kind of beautiful reckless abandon.
I don’t have one best day of my life. I hope I never do. I think life is a patchwork of all the best moments cobbled together. Some of the best moments happen on some of the worst days, and vice versa. It’s not so black and white. But certainly, there are days, and moments, that I find myself holding particularly close with particularly gentle hands; returning to with an overwhelming sense of love and happiness and a kind of awestruck disbelief that I got to live them. And they are always the moments when I choose to discard fear, anxiety, and overthinking in order to taste the fullness of life.
This picture was taken on one of those (many) best days of my life. In May of 2021, three girlfriends and I packed our bags to spend a weekend at the beach: lounging in the sun, staying up late playing card games, and eating beach snacks for breakfast to save money (there is no bad time for chips and guacamole). This day in particular, we ran into some of our friends from Nashville on the beach. Laying in the Florida sun, we decided that piña coladas sounded too good to pass up. The ten of us trekked through squeaky white sand to a tiki bar right off the beach that was rocking with live music and lots of sunburn.
As we peered at the menu, we struck up a conversation with an older couple: Tom and Tracy. For whatever reason, Tracy and I fell into a deep conversation while browsing the menu together. She launched into her life story, telling me about her two daughters and how Tom was the love of her life who happened to be her father’s best friend. When her father had passed, Tom, of course, had attended the funeral. It was there that their relationship sparked. I’ll admit – the story weirded me out at first. But I could see the love in her face when she looked at and talked about Tom, how her eyes shone like he was the sun of her solar system. Grief brings people together. It makes them cling desperately to the things they can still touch. This man held a piece of her father in him. She held a piece of his best friend. This was just their way of clinging to the people they loved, of making them live on when they were no longer there. Maybe their relationship wasn’t as weird as I initially thought.
Tom was, of course, significantly older than Tracy, already deep into retirement. He had endearing smile lines carved into the corners of his eyes, with a shock of snow-white hair and a tan so vibrantly saturated into his skin that he was almost purple.
“We come here all the time,” Tom told us, his incredibly tanned chest swelling with pride. “We love when we get to hang out with good, young folk like you.” He looked around, beaming. “Matter of fact, all of your piña coladas are on me.” The bar erupted into cheers. Tom fished into his wallet and handed his credit card to one of our friends named Zach, who blinked, grinned, then turned to the bartender. Uh, can I get ten piña coladas, please?
Another one of our friends, Dasha, then convinced the live band to hand her the mic, where she did a hilariously terrible rendition of Darius Rucker’s “Wagon Wheel.” The entire bar was stomping and singing along. And if I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free…
Tracy danced around us with open mouthed laughter. “Gosh!” She shouted. “Y’all are amazing! Y’all make me feel young again!” We stayed at that tiki bar for another four hours, dancing and singing and talking with this couple we would probably never see again. No phones, nowhere to be, nothing to worry about. Just being close to one another, feeling young together, existing. The sun began to set, and it was one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen; so beautiful that it was what finally pulled us away from Tom and Tracy. We hugged them goodbye to go watch the sunset from the beach.
As we left the tiki bar, for no particular reason, the ten of us began to run. We sprinted down the beach, shouting and yelling, kicking up sand. The sky was the color of a tangerine, the sun melting into the ocean like hot wax. We sprinted right into the water – tripping in the unexpected potholes and face planting into the foaming surf, laughing and stumbling and careless.
Now, to be clear, I am terrified of sharks. Terrified. I always avoid swimming at sunset because it’s supposedly “hunting time” for sharks; and no, I don’t bother fact-checking this. Even a baseless rumor is enough to deter me from the water.
But floating in a sea of liquid bronze, I couldn’t bring myself to care. I couldn’t bring myself to care about sharks or stingrays or taxes or jobs or cities or exhaust fumes or disease. I couldn’t bring myself to care about what people thought of me or the way my body looked in a bikini. Instead, for a brief moment, I was just a human and her nature, rocking with the undulations of the ocean. Sea like bath water, sky like forbidden fruit. I just existed. I just was. It was a moment of intense clarity; a moment of brief, impossible eureka. It was a moment worth dying for.
So much of the goodness in life is just relaxing into being. Releasing the chokehold on your life. Existing how you were created to be. And quite frankly, not caring so much. As we grow older, we clutch our lives with such painstaking care, because we are very important people with very important to-do lists and we’ve got very big things to accomplish. We wistfully consider the best days of our life to be when we were young because that was the only time we allowed ourselves to not care so much.
Life was more enjoyable that way, no? When everyone cared a little less? The best moments in life, the ones worth dying for, are embedded in the beauty of swallowing your fear; of living beside it, but not letting it drive you; of leaning back into the truth that God is greater than your fear will ever be.
I still think about Tracy at her father’s funeral, seeing Tom for the first time in years, feeling an unexpected and terrifying rush of love for him. I can’t imagine what was going through her head. Is this insane? What will people say? What will people think?
She could have cared herself to death. She could have convinced herself right out of the love of her life. But she found a moment worth dying for instead.
—
When the sky above us had churned from bright orange to dusky purple and finally, to a deep indigo, my friends began to trickle out of the water. The breeze coming off the water was cold. We were starting to get hungry. But my friend Conley and I stayed in the water, splashing around in the shallows like little kids.
Our friend Tucker came running down from the beach, holding a cheap film camera in his hands. “Don’t move!” he called out, wading into the surf. “Trust me, you’re going to want to capture this moment.”
Loved this, Grace. Good memories seem to be inextricably tied to lightheartedness. It's almost as if the memory itself shifts to the background, leaving the center stage to the carelessness of the moment and the "relaxation into being". And that's what makes us feel good. Marvellous piece.
This is a great reflection, Grace. Life wisdom in one sentence: “So much of the goodness in life is just relaxing into being.”