The moment I step onto the sand, something in me changes.
My shoulders drop. My breathing slows down. And my brain, which normally has about seventeen different things happening at once, gets noticeably quieter.
This is the sixth time I’ve taken what I lovingly call my solo art beach retreat, and over the years, it has become one of the absolute highlights of my year. I rent an oceanfront place for three weeks, pack up my car with far too many art supplies, and head to the beach completely by myself.
Whenever I tell people about this trip, I think they imagine three glorious weeks of making art and sitting on the beach.
There is definitely some of that.
But here’s the funny part. I also bring a fairly long list of business projects with me. I have planning meetings with my team while looking out at the ocean. I write, I work on lessons, and I think about what’s next for my business and my art.
So on paper, I suppose you could call this a working vacation. But that isn’t what it feels like to me at all.
I’ve realized that the reason I come back year after year has much less to do with the beach, or even the art, and much more to do with giving myself enough space to hear what I actually want.
What Happens When We Step Outside Our Normal Lives
I love my everyday life and all the joy that I get from my home, my husband, my studio, my work and the community I’ve built around it.
But my everyday life is also full.
There are emails waiting for answers, meetings on the calendar, things I need to create, errands that need to be run and all those ordinary responsibilities that come with having a life you love. Even when none of those things feel particularly stressful, they create a certain amount of noise. And I’ve discovered that sometimes I need to physically step away from that noise before I can hear myself clearly again.
That’s what happens for me at the beach.
There’s something about waking up in a place where my normal routines and responsibilities aren’t waiting for me that creates a little more room inside my head. And once that room opens up, I start hearing things I couldn’t quite hear at home.
Ideas arrive. Questions I’ve been carrying around suddenly have answers. Sometimes I realize that something I thought I wanted doesn’t feel important anymore. Other times, something I’ve been quietly thinking about suddenly feels very clear.
I don’t think the ocean is giving me the answers, although sitting in front of it certainly doesn’t hurt.
I think I’m finally getting quiet enough to hear the answers that were already there.
One Question Guides My Days
Over the years, I’ve developed a very simple practice during these retreats. Throughout the day, I stop and ask myself:
What do you want to do next?
That’s it.
Not, What should I be doing?
Not, What would be the most productive thing I could do right now?
Not even, What did I put on my list for today?
Just, What do you want to do next?
Then I try to listen to the first quiet answer that comes up.
Some mornings the answer really is to work. I’ll happily spend several hours writing or planning something I’ve been excited to have time to think about.
Other times, I’ll suddenly want to pull out one of the online art classes I’ve been saving for this trip and make something that no one else will probably ever see.
And then there are afternoons when the answer is simply to take my journal down to the beach, put my feet in the sand and think about my life.
The important part isn’t what I choose.
It’s that I’m choosing it from a different place.
Learning the Difference Between “Want To” and “Should”
This has been one of the more interesting things I’ve learned from taking these trips alone.
There is a surprisingly big difference between what I actually want and what I’ve convinced myself I should want.
I think most of us have a lot of “shoulds” running quietly in the background. We should be more productive. We should exercise. We should make more art. We should finish the project we started. We should say yes because someone asked us. We should be doing something useful with this perfectly good afternoon.
I’m certainly not suggesting that we can go through life doing only what we feel like doing. I would have stopped doing laundry decades ago.
But I do think it’s very easy to become so accustomed to listening to all the shoulds that we stop noticing the quieter voice underneath them.
That’s the voice I’m trying to hear when I come here.
You Don’t Need Three Weeks at the Beach to Create Space
Of course, I realize that disappearing to an oceanfront Airbnb for three weeks is a tremendous luxury, and certainly not something everyone can or wants to do.
But I don’t think that’s really the point.
The beach is simply the way I’ve found to create enough distance from my regular life that I can hear myself again. Your version could look completely different.
Maybe it’s an afternoon alone at a coffee shop with your journal. It could be an hour walking somewhere beautiful without listening to a podcast, or an entire Saturday in your studio with your phone turned off. Maybe it’s sitting on your porch for twenty minutes before everyone else wakes up.
What matters is creating a little bit of space where no one needs anything from you and nothing has to be accomplished.
Then asking yourself a question you may not ask very often:
What do I want?
And giving yourself enough time to hear the answer.
The Part I Want to Bring Home With Me
Eventually, my three weeks at the beach always come to an end.
By then I’ve usually made art, done a surprising amount of work, filled pages of my journal and thought through things I didn’t even realize needed thinking through. I’m also ready to go home. That’s another thing I love about this retreat. It doesn’t make me want to escape my real life. It makes me excited to return to it.
But I do try to bring one thing home with me.
That question.
What do you want to do next?
I certainly can’t organize every day around the answer, but I can ask it more often. I can notice when I’m moving through my life entirely on autopilot. I can pay attention when the “shoulds” have gotten particularly loud.
And every once in a while, I can choose the quieter answer.
Maybe that’s what this annual retreat has really taught me. We don’t necessarily need someone else to tell us what comes next. Sometimes we simply need enough space to hear what our own heart has been saying all along.
So I’m curious about you.
What has your heart been telling you lately? And maybe the more important question is, are you following what you hear?
I’d love to hear your answer in the comments.
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