In every place we live there is somewhere that we go that we consider the idealization of that place. It combines the feeling of the whole area, everything you love, and the unity that comes with both those things.
And when you get there, you feel your shoulders drop their stress, and your throat unclench a little, and there is a calm and a peace that flows smoothly into your lungs and everything your eyes can rest on is beautiful and right.
When I lived in Nebraska, it was a coffee shop right in the middle of downtown, surrounded by old brick walls and balconies. Friends would often come through the door, the coffee would steam its coffee smell in front of me, and I would read and study, no matter if it was raining or snowing, hot or cold.
In Okinawa, it was a beach ten minutes from our house, where Japanese women would come down to the water to pick out the dark green seaweed, washing in their buckets in order to ready it for selling to stores and restaurants. The coral reached out a quarter of a mile to the edge of the surf, and the crabs would pop in and out of their holes.
And here, it is the sandbar.
Plato talks about the ‘forms’, the perfect idealization of a physical object. He means that something physical will always have a flaw, and the real spirit, the truest nature of a thing is in our minds.
And if there’s anywhere that the idealization of Hawaii and the physical meet, it is the sandbar, a mile or so into the middle of the bay, surrounded by a dark green curve of mountains and the aqua green horizon.
When I think of Hawaii, this is it, a long sandy beach just covered in waves, a small uninhabited tropical island in the distance, and the soft green of the shallow water suddenly giving way to the deep blues and purples of the deep.
But, like Plato said, the perfect idealization is always better than reality. Even the sandbar cannot be perfect. We went with Lincoln’s low-grade fever and an exhausted, angry Eliot. Lincoln spent most of his time sadly on the boat and Eliot screamed at anyone who would not let him walk on his own in water that was too deep for him. If we go out there, we accept the rules that say we need life jackets that pinch our cheeks and make it hard to move. And yesterday we left with sunburns, all four of us, that still burn and itch today.
But maybe something that Plato forgot to mention is that the idealization misses something. The idealization, that perfect picture in your mind, is not physical. It cannot be experienced. I can look at pictures from the sandbar all day long (and trust me, I’d love to), but they do not capture the feeling when the babies curl up on laps after a long day, when we head back home in the winds from the boat.
Pictures cannot remind us of the sweetness of the sangria down our throats unless we have tasted it before. An image of a turtle popping his head up in the water means nothing to us unless we have felt the boat rock when all the children excitedly thump from one side of the boat to the other and unless we count the seconds it watches us before diving back down again, to its dark world where we cannot follow. Knowing the sandbar exists is nothing unless you know how the anchor line stretches out to the horizon, taut from the weight of the boat, slimy and damp.
If we want perfect, we stick to pictures. If we want real life, we accept the physical, and with it, its limitations. So we live in the imperfect. If we want to play the piano, we practice to get better. We study painting, singing, and writing. A physical working out of an idealization always puts limits on something, but it makes it real. It means we’ve worked for what we’ve gotten. It means we’ve paid the price for the experiences, for the beautiful pictures in our mind. They have not been cheaply bought. We have put in the hours for a good run, we have worked through the problems in making a good essay, and we paid the price for a day in the place that most epitomizes Hawaii.
Sunburns and fevers and white sand and sunshine.
Sarah Clouser says
That looks amazing!!!
dananicoleboyer@gmail.com says
Thank you! It’s so beautiful and I’m so amazed to be living here!