Will a rock every just be a goddam rock?

After dropping the kids off at school this morning she went for a walk by the ocean before starting work. The clouds were low, mist blotted out the world a few feet from the shore. It is one of her favorite walks, dramatic but simple, the rocks forming large plateaus that are easy to climb but just hard enough that you feel like you are on an adventure. She stood on top of one of these rocks and breathed in the ocean, a ripple of joy rushing over her. Goddam it, she thought! Why can’t the smell of the ocean, for once, just be the smell of the ocean!? Why does it always have to evoke some existential crisis as the meaning of life rises up and crashes over her, everything so layered and soaked in sentiment?

Back when she was a kid, when she would spend her summers at the beach, hunting for crabs in ever-changing rock pools, she never paused in blissed out contentment to marvel at life, she just lived it. Of course, this lack of realization came with the self-absorbed territory of young childhood, where feelings are generally experienced as simply good or bad, there is no past to drown in nostalgia, the future only stretching as far as when is the next meal. Life is right where you are, it is as zen as it is ever going to get.

As a middle-aged human, she works daily at trying to be this present. Unlike her slovenly six-pack luxuriating under a soft pillow of nope never can, never will, her awareness muscle is a fine-tuned monster machine on steroids that can bring her great delight (and great pain). As an artist, this ability to be able to feel things deeply, to be aware of the enormity of life that is around us, is as important as breathing, if she doesn’t feel she doesn’t eat, literally.

But sometimes all a girl wants is a damn hamburger. To see a flower and say, oh there is a flower, or better yet ignore it and move on, pass the ketchup please. Can’t a woman take a superficial minute and enjoy an ml of trans fats instead of a healthy medley of organic mushrooms lighted sautéed in a gentle mist of lime-infused Chardonnay, complimented by the subtle aroma of wild black rice sprinkled with saffron from the sloping fields of Pakistan? Will she ever be able to have a day at the beach again without some deeply intensive soul-moving experience? Will a rock ever just be a goddam rock?