A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica. I was awed by the beauty of the country, but specifically by the beach I was on. It was a rather small cove surrounded by lush trees. One tip of the cove was black volcanic rock spotted with urchined native plants growing from every crevice. The other, a tree infested outcropping, so green it made your eyes hurt. Out along the horizon, four separate islands of varying size, stood as sentinels, appreciating the focus every eye gave them as one looked out on the horizon. The beach was definitely the cleanest beach I had ever seen, there wasn’t any seaweed or garbage, only an occasional coconut or log.
Daily I walked from tip to tip, with soft sand at the bottom of my feet and the cool surf occasionally washing up around my ankles. As an avid shell seeker, there was slight disappointment, as there were no shells to seek, hence there was very little reason to look down, except to see the myriad of footprints half washed away. So my thoughts would look forward and outward to the beautiful sea or to the tip of the cove, or behind me to see how far I had come. Occasionally I would look immediately down at my feet, or maybe a couple of steps away, but slowly I would find that again I would be focusing ahead, to my beautiful distant future.
One evening while walking back from exploring the far tip of the cove, my friends and I started separating, one stopping to take off her shoe, another stopping to take a photograph. I soon found myself behind the others, and my mind immediately looked up towards the sun spotted tip where I was heading. I then looked a little ways ahead of me and watched the pattern of my friends footprints as they danced along the shore, and then for one short moment, I looked immediately at my feet. And there it lay right at the inside of my foot, a beautiful brown and cream spiraled shell. The kind that you can only find in souvenir shops. I realized that if I hadn’t paid attention to my immediate present, A rare treasure might have been lost.
As we live life, there are times when we need to look out at our own beautiful future, planning and walking towards it, focusing on it and wondering about it, for we do need to know where we are going, and there are other times that we should look back at our experiences and see the shaping of who we are, evaluating each footprint and remembering how it brought us to our current self. Yet it is when we live the immediate present, we find the treasure of opportunity that is waiting for us, right at our feet.
