Walking in a Bathing Suit Full of Sand
The folly of trying to schedule a spiritual epiphany
As I write this, I’m living — but barely breathing — under the tyranny of a stranger’s farts. I’m trapped in a plane, at cruising altitude, typing on my phone with angry, bewildered little thumbs as I fly home from a trip I hoped would yield a more elegant essay than this, an essay typed on a laptop, an essay written free of tyranny, an essay in which I’d reveal to you the great spiritual epiphany I planned to have on my trip, during which I was to finally feel the scale of the cosmos. Also, you should know, as I wrote this, I made a note to myself to not use the f-word when describing the aforementioned tyranny. “Use ‘pass gas’ instead,” the note reads. “‘Farts’ is disgusting.”
As it turns out, “pass gas” is for a different kind of essay, one written on a laptop, one about triumph, not failure. As much as it pains me to say, and as much as I believe you deserve better, this essay stoops to farts.
One thing I learned on this trip, which is pretty much the opposite of what I was planning to learn, is that just as you start writing about spirituality, just as you start teaching a little spirituality — sharing exercises you say are not “outcome-oriented,” because you’re so above that — just when you think you know a thing or two, that’s when you get the message, the message being: at any given moment, you don’t know shit. And yeah, those I-don’t-know-shit moments can occasionally string themselves together to become a whole fat week; a week that might look at first glance like a nice little beach vacation, a week your wife might describe as a “babymoon,” but most important, a week that secretly contained your high-minded mission to get in better touch with the scale of the universe and then bring that sweet nectar of enlightenment back to the yearning masses, in the form of a beautiful, dignified essay.
As it turns out, if you manage to take the exact wrong steps, you can end a mission like that in spectacular fashion. This is that story.
For years now, I’ve been hearing talk about how there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. Can you believe that? It sounds absurd, right? But it’s true. At least insofar as anything we know about space is “true” right now — let’s not forget, in a cool thousand years, our current concept of the universe and the fabric of reality will be filed away with all previous iterations as among the most ignorant perspectives ever dreamed up. But don’t worry about that right now, just worry about coming to grips with all those stars and all that sand.
As it turns out, that’s the crux of the problem — coming to grips with it all. When dealing with a comparative reference like this stars and sand thing, you can’t just hear it and think, “Huh, that’s wild.” You can’t just think about it for one or two minutes, scan all the coastlines of Earth in your mind, cleverly make sure to account for every beach from southern Chile to northern Norway, cleverly ask questions like “Does that include all the sand underwater too?” and think that based on all your cleverness you’ve got a decent sense of it. You have to come to grips with the sand, literally — or so I was prepared to argue, in a much more elegant essay, had my recent beach vacation gone remotely according to plan.
What I was going to tell you, with a gently balanced tone of authority that hinted look man, I’ve lived in the constructs of this question for a week, is you have to make space in your life to commune with nature, to feel wind grip the nape of your neck, to watch a field of violet crocuses open in the early morning light, and to sit by the ocean as a child might, under the spell of pounding surf, with your feet buried deep in the sand, as you grab fistfuls of that sand and pour it slowly over your shins, delighting at the randomness of how each grain bounces off your skin, just as I used to do when I was eleven, as my body sat slack under a mind as wide as the sky.
That’s the kind of thing I was planning to tell you about! I was going to have this powerful communion with sand, as a 39-year-old man, then report back to you that I finally felt the scale of the universe and the experience just about cracked me open like one of Carl Sagan’s wide, dazzling smiles. I was also likely going to do some finger-wagging at the youth, asking if they’ve ever even thought to commune with sand “like we did when we were kids,” or if they’re just too busy posing for pictures. Boy, what a fresh take that would’ve been. Zing — got ‘em!
I’m sure some of you are waiting to hear the numbers on this whole proposition. You want some proof — however feeble it may prove over time — of this claim about stars and sand. You should, because when you really think about it, when you consider that each star is more or less like our sun, and each could therefore have one or more Earth-like habitats orbiting it, this whole thing gets quite wild, quite fast, in all that it implies.
I’ll give you some numbers, but I’m telling you right now, I’m not going to labor over them. This is not that essay. In a more serious essay, I’d really get into the nitty-gritty with you. But not here.
First, let’s get you acquainted with the scale of big numbers: a million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 31 years, a trillion seconds is 31,688 years. Capice? This helps too: if you spent $70,000 a day, it would take forty years to spend a billion dollars. Now stay with me — don’t go grinding your gears over the insanity of superwealth. Stick with the stars, it’s much better for you.
The simplest way to put this is, best estimates suggest the universe has two trillion galaxies, and most of those galaxies contain between hundreds of millions and hundreds of billions of stars. For example, we think the Milky Way has about 250 billion stars, one of them being our sun.
I’m not going to link out to sources on this, for a few reasons: one, the frailty of our knowledge is hysterical; two, this lowly essay has the word “farts” in it, and three, one of the top results in Google when you search “How many galaxies are in the universe?” is an article on MarthaStewart.com. You want sources? There you go. As if this whole thing couldn’t get any more ridiculous. And I don’t even know who to blame. Has Google gotten so sloppy they’re daring to cite Martha Stewart as an authority on astrophysics, or has Martha Stewart gotten so ambitious she’s graduated from probing pot roast to probing space? (Since neither is a world I care to live in, let’s just move on.)
As for the actual trip, the vacation, I’m not sure where to start. I suppose the first day is as good a place as any. For context, we stayed at a nice resort on a beach — the kind where you’re not sure the pain of the price will ever yield to the pleasure you seek. In that sense, it was no different than life as a whole. Very on-point for existential exploration.
My mission to commune with the sand was foiled the first day, as we decided to spend it by the pool. I guess I wasn’t in much of a hurry.
Things were going well by the pool for about five minutes, until I heard an unabashed guy tell a four-minute story that I can tell right now in 10 seconds: the guy once walked into a bar at a golf club, Arnold Palmer was there, he smiled at Arnold from across the bar, Arnold smiled back. I know you think I’m dropping key details, but I’m not. Plot-wise, that was it. Obviously he had more to say to fill four minutes, but the rest was all about the glimmering energy he felt in the room as old Arnie’s smile passed through the air, undoubtedly moving at the speed of light, though it must have felt much slower given how long this guy milked the story.
So now I’m sitting in judgment. Very unspiritual. It’s no way to start this whole thing out. What’s worse, the judgment is based on a technicality. I love the idea of humans connecting and feeling glimmering energy in the room! But I’m judging this guy because he’s a “golfer.” And you know what I mean — not just someone who plays golf, someone who’s really tapped in to the ethos.
An hour after sitting in judgment of golfers, I start acting like one and order a lobster roll. The price reads “MKT,” which is short for “market,” which is short for “look the other way pal, we’ll surprise you.” I figure there’s a decent chance I’ll spend much of the trip wiggling my toes in the sand and renouncing consumption as I gaze dreamily into something like the eye of God, so why not, how bad could it be? All the other sandwiches are $14–18, so it’s not like I’m in uncharted waters. Sure, they probably push “MKT” into the $20s, but I’m on a cosmic communion babymoon, I’m cool with it.
The lobster roll arrives and it’s stupidly big (warning, red alert); as I eat it, I’m thinking, huh, this is a boatload of lobster meat. You know how sometimes you think you’re getting away with something, you think the universe goofed and the scales tipped in your favor and you hear no contrarian voice propose that something may be missing from your analysis? This was one of those times. The lobster roll was decent, then I got the bill.
Forty dollars. Four. Zero. American dollars. For a sandwich. Read it and weep. Honestly, if it had been $41 or $42, I probably would’ve been less pissed off because at least those numbers seem like actual manifestations of market fluctuation. Forty even, on the dot? That’s just resort fiends saying: we got you, moron.
Here’s the bright side: I came looking to turn a number — a quantity really (of sand and stars) — into a spiritual feeling, a shrine I could bow before, a sense of magnitude that would crush my “self” into a fine powder of deference. On day one, I got my wish. It just happened to take a smaller number than a billion trillion. That number was 40.
The next morning my wife and I decide to go for a nice, long walk on the beach. She’s due to arrive from breakfast while I’m already down at the water’s edge, swiping my toes through wet sand, trying to get in a good cosmic frame of mind, thinking about the lobster roll, thinking about why I can’t let the lobster roll go, thinking about what could possibly be taking her so long to walk over here, and thinking about what it means for my future if I can’t more swiftly access a good cosmic state of mind.
Needless to say, mood-wise, I’m quite a little crab when she arrives.
We make it about 75 yards down the beach before I put a very sandy foot in my mouth. My wife has begun telling me about an idea she has for a revolutionary new type of bra. Not a sexy bra, per se, more of a businesslike bra, built to do some heavy lifting.
I listen intently to the idea, and though the description is a bit vague for my taste, it sounds like she’s on to something in terms of novel load-bearing mechanisms. It also sounds like a monumental design challenge, and I tell her so. I say I think she’ll need advanced knowledge of structural engineering and textile technology, and I ask how passionate she is about the problem, all the while knowing this is a person who hates clothes — hates shopping for them, hates wearing them.
As it turns out, I was just supposed to say, “Sounds cool.” She suggests I’m a villain for not being more encouraging. I suggest I’m a hero for speaking the truth. This goes on for a few minutes. Meanwhile, as we talk, we walk over millions and millions of grains of sand. I’m missing it!
You’d think that was my one big faux pas on the walk, but I manage another when we arrive at a little stone pier where we’re due to turn around. At the end of the pier there’s a young boy, maybe ten, throwing a small cast net in the water. He’s barely getting it off the pier. I can tell he’s both proud and frustrated, and that he might like someone to stroll by and ask what he’s doing.
Cast nets are circular and have little weights around the perimeter — you wind up like a discus thrower, toss it out over the water, let it sink, then pull it in. They’re for catching little baitfish like snook or shrimp, but this kid isn’t catching squat. I was introduced to cast nets last year through beautiful slow motion videos on social media that show professional Indonesian fishermen throwing industrial-size nets probably 30 feet in diameter — what starts as a bundle in their hands expands in mid-air like a giant spider web firework.
Anyway, this boy’s net is six feet wide, made of cheap plastic. What do I do? I walk up and ask him if he’s seen “the really big ones” on social media. He says no. I say “they’re really cool.”
This is beyond the pale for me. I might as well have shoved him in the water. Here’s a boy working the sea with his hands, communing with nature, throwing out his own little galaxies of hope, and I walk up to ask if he’s seen the bigger, cooler version of what he’s doing on social media. Across a week of shrimp-brain maneuvers, this was a top contender.
The walk ends with me animatedly explaining “The Great Filter” theory to my wife, which in the context of the Fermi Paradox, essentially asks: is there some threshold past which intelligent life rarely crosses, which is the reason we don’t find a universe teeming with intelligent life? It’s not always easy to read someone’s interest when you’re worked up in a geeky froth of alien talk, but if I had to guess, in that moment, my wife was on the brink of suggesting that if I was really interested in feeling the scale of the universe, in feeling the numerosity of grains of sand on the beach, I ought to pour a handful into my wet bathing suit and go for a long walk. Of course she didn’t say that, her grace knows no bounds.
The next couple days go by and not much eventful happens. We have a lovely time, and some of the usual stuff — I get scolded for counting down the number of days we have left; I continually ask “Is this your room key or mine?”; and during beautiful sunsets, I feel ashamed by the slightest tickle of boredom. I guess the point is, never mind cosmic communion, if you want a tranquil vacation, you better pack a tranquil head.
As for the sand, I spent maybe 20 minutes contemplating it, across five days. That’s half the time I spent contemplating odd-looking bodies. It just never clicked. Certainly not as easily as I was preparing to report to you, in a much loftier essay, in which I was surely going to tell you to just take some time out of your day, pour some sand on your shins, watch the grains bounce off, and recalibrate your whole sense of reality. It’s so simple, I would cheer.
I know what you’re wondering: Andy, did you bring the right books? You bet I did. I brought two perfect books. One was the appropriately titled White Sands, by Geoff Dyer, a series of essays about Dyer’s disappointments while traveling (ahem). The other was The Varieties of Scientific Experience, a posthumously published series of lectures given by Carl Sagan, neatly encapsulating his lifelong search for spiritual revelation in the verifiable magnificence of the cosmos (ahem). Definitely the right books… maybe the wrong guy. Or maybe they were so right they became wrong, in that they further contributed to my careful plotting towards the destination, the exact kind of destination you can’t so pointedly pursue, lest it collapse under the weight of your expectation. (I feel obligated to note, that’s exactly how stars are born — from collapse.)
On our last full day, injury was added to insult. I still have no idea what happened to my face. My best guess is something called photodermatitis, but the technical name doesn’t matter — all that matters is it suddenly became red, itchy and swollen beyond recognition. Here’s the kicker. The night before we leave for the trip, I’m standing over my toiletry bag, looking down. In it there’s a tube of hydrocortisone cream from a previous skin mishap on a previous trip. My hand hovers over the bag and the following inner dialogue ensues:
“Take it out, you don’t need it.”
“Leave it, it’s small, you might need it.”
“Take it out, you’re not an old grandpa.”
Fast-forward five nights: I’m thrashing in bed and biting my hands to keep from itching as fluid weeps through odd lumps all over my face. No skin of mine has ever more desperately craved the cooling salve of hydrocortisone cream, which I don’t have a lick of because I’m not an old grandpa.
The next morning we go to the airport. The tight seal of my N95 mask creates fleshy crags all around my face and two huge purple bulges under my eyes. It looks like I got jumped by one of those jacked kangaroos you see pictured under clickbait headlines like “12 Animals You Didn’t Know Could Kill You.”
I finally get my hands on some Benadryl and cream. As I slide into my seat on the plane, I’m feeling pretty mellow. The ambient white noise of the air filtration system is soothing. From inside my gently tranquilized body, I look out through little slits I once called eyes. I’m still well short of any spiritual breakthrough. In fact, I start to wonder if I’ve committed fraud. Not one week earlier I published an essay declaring our supposed universal desire to be connected to each other, blended into one, the way we once were in our mothers’ wombs. But if that theory were to hold, we’d find the experience of air travel downright ecstatic. We would decry the seats are too far apart and demand more orgiastic closeness. Instead, as I look down the length of the cabin, I see a big aluminum sausage that everyone loathes being stuffed into. I see a bunch of people side-eyeing each other because they know they paid widely varying prices depending on the millisecond they booked. I see a bunch of people who have reluctantly gathered to cough on each other, entwine forearm hair and quietly nurse visions of their fiery deaths upon the slightest feeling of turbulence. How fast will it happen? What will I feel? Will the flames or blunt force get me? Who will I mash into?
After a few minutes, we take off. A few minutes after that, someone starts farting. I don’t think it needs to be said, but this was the final nail in the coffin.
I reacted as I always do in these scenarios, which is to say, I visualized the molecular narrative of what was happening. I was indoctrinated in this line of thinking by a germaphobe friend who once prompted me — once is enough, once is everlasting — to consider the most vile implication of what it means for molecules that originate in some inconsiderate asshole to be detected by your olfactory nerve, inches from your mouth. I don’t think I’m alone in what I know. By this point, we’ve all seen the Covid-19 aerosol explainer animations.
I’ve always found this molecular narrative unbearable… except this most recent time. This time, it prompted a spiritual epiphany. It was a small and unwelcome one, but undeniable. What occurred to me is this: if ever there’s a time to adopt (and quickly worship) the Hindu perspective of Brahman, or the Grand Unified Theory of quantum mechanics — both of which claim we are all connected to the point of being indistinct at subatomic levels, that we are all made of the same inseparable material, be it “God” or interwoven waves of energy that form a grand quantum quilt — that time is when you are trapped in a plane under the tyranny of a stranger’s farts. Again, not the epiphany I wanted, just the one I got.
