At Chain's End

The beach is where I found it, lying there, knowingly awaiting my arrival. The beach, although I'm not sure how far I've actually gone, seems far away and distant. I can't see much across the distance behind me, it seems like a blur how the horizon just stretches out, the sky meets the land, or maybe the sea, I can't tell anymore; like I said it's a blur now. Didn't think to measure the distance either, though I knew it could of gone on forever it didn't much matter; maybe because all I was concerned with was what was at the end of this.

I never thought that place would be the beginning of a journey. My wife suggested it as a way to end some of the stress in our lives, a vacation. I couldn't understand why she would want to get away. Why would anyone want to leave the city? It has everything you need, anything you could want, and you can have it within two minutes or you'll get it free. I didn't understand what going away from everything and anything would accomplish. Whatever you're looking for the city had it, and you could always find it for a better price at one of the other thousands of stores. What could we look for out there to end stress that we couldn't find in the place that had it all?

The city was where my entire life had happened; I was born there, began school there, made all of my friends there, and climbed the occupational ladder there. Never in my life had I ever spent a moment thinking that I would ever want to leave, or if I left for any reason, ever finding something better.

The first home my parents owned was a small apartment, the usual way couples start off there, and from which some never leave. A home surrounded by other apartments and other towering buildings. The memory that will always resound in my mind is the amount of people. It's amazing how many people you can cram into a small area. People bustling everywhere, apartment buildings, stores and the streets were alive and crawling with people. When we eventually bought a house in the suburbs, we could still see the skyscrapers in the distance. We were still surrounded by people; although when one has grown up used to the suffocation of close quarters this 5 square metres of grass they called a back yard, and the metre and a half of space between our house and the next seemed to be an incredible amount of space. My world consisted of metal, cement, and fibreglass; man made fabrications of greatness. There was little natural beauty to speak of; grass was a weed to be controlled and manipulated. A means of bragging, or of shame when compared to the neighbour's vibrant and luscious patch. The few measly trees were to be found at the park, and the only home grown flowers that were to be found were small boxes and planters.

This vacation seemed important to her though, so I went along with it. She wanted to rent a cottage by the sea for a few months to really get away from it all. She really meant get away from it all; there was nothing there. Instead of tall impressive towers, busy sidewalks, and wide-open highways, there were trees, weeds as high as my waist, and narrow dirt roads. Instead of convenience and competition for lowest cost, every thing was rustic and simplistic. Or was that just my interpretation of it all? I'm not so certain of what I thought anymore. In order to be politically correct, what I thought was only true to myself, and what everyone else thought was the truth for them. So if I was the only one thinking it than how could what I thought, or anyone else thought for that matter, be the truth? Instead being able to admit that what or how I thought could have been wrong, it was just what I had believed to be true. Well you can forget political correctness, I can see clearly now that I couldn't see beyond my industrialist mind, couldn't understand natural beauty, what I thought had been twisted and clouded by ways of political correctness. My mind had been corrupted from all of the years of subjection to that way of life.