Beachcombing at Miramar: The Quest for an Authentic Life
Richard Bode
Warner Books, 1996
I first read Richard Bode’s Beachcombing at Miramar: The Quest for an Authentic Life 10 years ago. Since then, I have re-read it several times. If I had to make a list of books I’d want with me on a desert island, Beachcombing at Miramar would definitely be on my list.
When Richard Bode’s four children were grown, and his marriage of thirty years was at an end, he left a successful career on the east coast and moved to Miramar, California. All he took with him was “my van, my clothes, my typewriter, my record player, my unabridged dictionary, and a few favorite books” - and a “check, which if converted to cash, might have filled a shoe box with twenty-dollar bills.”
At the start of Beachcombing at Miramar, Bode is living in a beach house, walking the beach daily, and relishing his newly-chosen life of simplicity. But what he is looking for is not so much the flotsam and jetsam of the beach, as an understanding of his own past and the re-invention of himself as the sole creator of his life.
In seventeen essays, Bode uses objects he finds on the beach, conversations with people he meets while beachcombing, and overseen or overheard interactions between other people on the beach to reflect back on his life and how he came to live at Miramar to finally pursue “an authentic life.”
There are lessons here that apply to almost all of us, including “how to see with new eyes the choices we make” - choices that can either lead us toward an authentic life where we are in touch with nature and our hearts, or to a lifetime of living an eventually unsatisfying role; choices that can reaffirm our knowledge of ourselves as who we really are, or lead us later to regret decisions that took us away from our true selves; and choices that can lead us to real happiness, rather than resigned compromise.
This lyrically written book takes me not just inside Richard Bode and his life, but leads me to re-examine my own choices every time I read it, and to find more life lessons that I can apply to my own life. I am grateful to him for sharing his beachcombing “finds” with all of us and showing us that it’s never too late to lead a life of authenticity.
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