PNW Week: We Are Adventurers! (Sea Glass Hunting Pt. 2)

We Are Adventurers!!!

By: Amanda Jane

My husband, Nic, loves Seattle. It really was the city of his dreams. To him it was perfectly green and perpetually cloudy. If Nic could live anywhere, forever, it would be Seattle, that’s why we were so excited when we found out he was accepted into a program at the University of Washington. However, moving to Seattle felt like a meaningless rebound to me. I truly was heartbroken to leave behind the life we had built in Omaha. Seattle felt so cold and lonely- but a large chunk of that was just my state of mind. With three kids and a husband in graduate school (going on four years) I was feeling some serious fatigue. I was sick of being poor, sick of having my husband gone studying 12 hours or more a day, sick of job interviews that never went anywhere. But more than anything I was sick of the unknown. We had invested all of our time, our marriage, our family, our faith, our money into a career that was sucking the life out of us. We were living off of faith, but often felt like we were drowning in quicksand. Beyond working hard and praying for help we were at the complete mercy of someone wanting to hire Nic. We had no idea where we’d be living, how we’d pay off our monstrous student loans, or even if we could find a legal job anywhere. From the outside it may seem trivial, but for us it felt all consuming. And there was nothing we could do but hope and wait.

Nic and I celebrated our 10th anniversary the month we moved to Seattle. With no other choice than to do something free, with all three kids in tow, all I wanted to do was go find some sea glass to mark the occasion. I had never found sea glass before but thought that the analogy of something rough and broken transforming into something  smooth and beautiful over time made for the perfect marriage analogy and would make for a terrific anniversary memory. So we went to a beach and searched for two hours and couldn't find a single, stupid piece of sea glass. 

Although I had spent hours looking for sea glass on our anniversary the first time I found some I wasn't even looking for it (and thus the first lesson of sea glass!) For a time in my life that felt entirely out of my hands collecting sea glass became the perfect hobby to teach me to be better at rolling with the punches. Finding quality sea glass isn't something you have complete control over- you are constantly at the mercy of the tides and the length of time the sea glass has been immersed. You can do everything “right” and find nothing or nature can throw you a bone and you find an amazing purple that matches your nail polish. I think the most beautiful lesson for me was that you really have no control over what (if any treasures) you will find on a given day - but when you do you feel lucky, and if you have an off day (or week) there is always tomorrow. For me it was a big lesson in perspective. I went to the beach multiple times a week, as pathetic as it sounds it was the best friend I had the year we lived there. I rarely listed to my music as I walked the shore, instead I would pour my soul out to the ocean waves. There is something incredibly monotonous and comforting about the clockwork of the tides, in and out over and over and over again forever. And thus it is with life- the tides will come and go, sometimes I will find amazing treasures and some days I’ll leave empty handed. But so much of what I find will be determined not by what I’m looking for per say, but the fact that I find things to be thankful for and excited for while I wait for what I’m looking for to happen.

"... an amazing purple that matches your nail polish."

My very best memory of our life in Seattle was when I bundled up all three kids in the middle of a freezing February day and we headed down to the beach. It was so cold and windy and the closer you got to the water the colder and windier the moisture-filled air felt. I’m sure the diners inside of the fancy, beachfront restaurant that overlooks the water wondered what kind of a mother brought their children to the beach under such conditions. But what they could never understand while peeling their fresh shrimp and sipping their cocktails was that we needed to get out of that house, Nic was studying and we were all feeling suffocated. Without telling the kids I thought to myself “we are going to be adventurous today even if it kills us.” It was so cold our noses and fingers were nearly numb even under our scarves and gloves, so windy that our hoods kept blowing off our head and the waves so powerful that it felt like we were constantly getting sprinkled with salt water rain. And then we started laughing. And then we couldn’t stop. Because we all knew how ridiculous it was to be outside, at the beach, in the middle of a storm. Then without warning my eight-year-old daughter, Scarlett, pulled out her video camera and started running down the beach yelling “We are adventurers! We are adventurers!” And so we all did the same thing as we raced back to the car. Right before I stepped off the rocky beachfront I found the biggest, most beautiful piece of sea glass I have found to date- it felt like it was Mother Nature’s way of thanking me for not being a fair weather friend. I stuck it in my coat pocket and caught up with the kids and once again joined in with gusto “We are adventurers! We are adventurers!” all the way back home.

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