By Andrea Lingle

My favorite thing to do at the beach is to walk along longwise in an inch or three of water, looking for sea critter dandruff. Shells, shark’s teeth, sea urchin cases: ocean dwellers’ thrifted items. Once I am pretty sure I found a whale bone. Another time I picked up several hundred little butterfly wings shells. I love finding unbroken scallop shells that seem so much like whimsical tiny fans for diminutive post-menopausal mermaids, and there is no greater triumph than to see the crown of a conch shell poking out of the sand. Nonchalantly, to avoid attracting competition from my fellow pursuers of sea rubble, I dig my toe under the edge of the spokes hoping for a treasure. Most of the time it is only a toupee—a broken fragment from the top of what had once been a glorious whirl of cream and salmon and mathematics. Every so often though, a titan of calcium carbonate rises from the sandy depths and that can make a heart leap.

I have left hundreds of footprints beach combing to no end at all. I do nothing with what I find other than pile them up in dishes and pots all over my house. I have never once tried to eat them or live in them. I don’t even put them in the hollow bodies of lamps. I just collect them.

Erik Erikson divided the human lifespan into eight sections. Five of them are completed by age twenty. The rest of the average life, sixty or so years, is dumped into three rather large buckets. That is a rather roomy time frame. You get roughly twenty or so years, on average, to figure each stage out. The mid-portion of adulthood is referred to as the time when one is dealing with generativity vs. stagnation or self-absorption. Will you contribute to your community, or let those around you shoulder the burden of tending to our shared life? Will you take your turn in the front of the migration formation or always allow another to brave the unbroken air? These are mid-life questions.

And mid-life is a treacherous place to be. There seems to be a crisis, internal or external, around every corner. The shreds of energy that remain at the end of each day are frittered away wondering if you have squandered your life in the wrong direction. Your health begins to trip you up and the bank account never seems to want to cooperate. You can hear your twenty-year-old self’s voice in your head, and it is a little disappointed that you haven’t quite changed the world in all the ways you thought you probably could. Gone is the vicenarian feeling that all the world needs to right itself is your perspective, energy, and wisdom. Now that you might actually possess wisdom, you are too wary of the world to think very highly of it.

It turns out most shells are broken.

The coveted whole conch shell is proudly revealed and gets displayed when it is brought home, but there is another conch shell that I always scoop up quickly as well. I love the conch that has been split down the middle lengthwise so that the inner revolution of the shell is revealed. The grown spiral is tangible grace. The outer shell, battered by life, is broken away to reveal an iridescent core of beauty. This to me is the heart of Sacred Disappointment. There is beauty in generativity, the wonderousness of success and true cooperation, and there is beauty in the bits and bobs of what is left behind by the relentless grind of living. Perhaps tonight, when the song of mid-life comes to call, offer it the counterpoint of your gracious inner core. It is disappointing when you know that fixing all the little broken things isn’t a one-person crusade and that your contribution to the world will probably be as large as the current made by a toothpick stirring the ocean, and disappointment becomes sacred when you realize that it wasn’t your perspective, energy, and wisdom that made your life worth living. Nothing you do does. It just is.

You are glorious.