El Salvador Reviews Part I

A note: Sometimes writing ideas come to me fully formed. Those are gifts. Other times, I get ideas as eggs, not fully formed and needing the right conditions to be written about. It could be I don't have the right entry point into the topic or the form isn't clear yet so I sit on those ideas. I've had a draft of this post sitting on my computer for about eight months. This post was an egg, needing space, time, and input of new information. 

It wasn't until I listened to John Green's podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, that I knew I wanted to write about some of my experiences of living in El Salvador as reviews. In the podcast, Green reviews different facets of the human condition on a five-star scale. In addition to listening to The Anthropocene Reviewed, I listened and read things that were sparks to fill in the missing pieces and be able to write about some of my experiences. Here is the first of several reviews of some of my particular experiences as an ex-pat living in El Salvador. 

Sitting on the Beach in the Sand

This is the view from one of our favorite Airbnbs in Punta Mango. We usually had the beach to ourselves. 

When you live abroad, you quickly learn the art of the weekend trip. Weekend beach trips were one of my favorite things to do in El Salvador. We had the organization of these trips down to a science. An e-mail would go out asking for interest/availability. This would be followed by a spreadsheet to sign up for rides and meals. While each weekend carried its own stories, there was a comforting familiarity of each trip following the same beats. We would arrive in time to watch the sunset from plastic chairs pulled out onto the beach. Days were spent in the endless rotation of hammock, pool, and ocean. The cycle was only interrupted by not-yet dry bodies padding barefoot into the kitchen to refill drinks or to get a snack. Gathering happened for meals, games, and star-lit conversations. Sometimes, depending on the beach, we would have the whole beach to ourselves. 

On one beach trip, we shared the beach. I sat on a pulled-out chair and spent a few minutes watching a father and son sitting on the beach. They weren't sitting on chairs. They were sitting, sometimes even lying down directly on the sand. Both were close enough to the water's edge for the waves to reach up and splash over them. Earlier I had been in the water playing an endless game of jump rope with the waves. In some ways, it seemed appealing to sit on the heat of the sand and feel the lap of the waves again. However, the idea was unappealing thinking about sand getting in uncomfortable places and being without a phone to take pictures or DJ. So I stayed in my chair. It was easy to see a pattern of ex-pats sitting in chairs and locals sitting right on the beach.

On one of his last beach trips, a friend boycotted a chair for sitting directly on the sand. He grabbed a bottle of Jimador and took a drink everytime the waves hit him. On our last couple of beach trips, some friends and I also made the move to sit directly on the sand. We were close enough for the waves to hit us, sometimes. It's frequently when things are coming to an end that we most urgently feel the need to pay attention. 

From a chair or directly on the beach, there is no incorrect way to experience witnessing the ocean. However, when I felt the sand underneath me and watched the water try to reach me, I realized that one of these experiences demanded giving more of my attention to the beach. 

There's no shortage of things for people to give their attention to. Herbert Simon coined the term "attention economy" to explain that with the rapid growth of information causes a scarcity of attention. Our attention is a valuable resource that we only have so much to give. This frequently results in giving shallower attention to many things. With the rise of social media, our attention is frequently more focused on what we view as relevant to us. It is so easy to check your phone for messages when there is a lull in the conversation. Does anyone want to talk to me? The internet uses algorithms to make sure content is relevant to use (because capitalism) because something that is not relevant to us costs our attention. Ads are curated to be of interest. Youtube suggests similar videos to encourage going down rabbit holes. Sometimes things that are not as relevant to us, don't get as much of our attention. 

Jenny Odell has studied attention in her book How to Do Nothing. She asks, "How do you do things that capitalism doesn't value? How do you do things that aren't considered productive?" She recognizes that we can't just stop giving our attention so something, like our phones. Instead, she suggests we need to replace it with something else. She answers, "the internet strips us of our sense of place and time, we counter its forces by becoming closer to the natural world." Particularly, she suggests grounding attention to focus on a place and retraining attention to focus on our surroundings. 

Sitting directly on the beach, I was grounded more in where I was. In the 1970s, Palmolive had a series of commercials that featured a manicurist named Madge. She would put people's hands in Palmolive dishwashing liquid and tell them, "you're soaking in it." When I sat on the sand, I was soaking in it. I could feel the grit of the sand getting everywhere. I was more aware of the course of the waves, wondering if shoes were far enough up on the beach to not be swept away by a wave. My attention was fully grounded and holding onto the time and place of my surroundings. I give sitting on the sand of a beach 3 1/2 stars. Again, sand gets everywhere.