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I remember the time I said to my wife, “I feel like eating out today for lunch.” “Fine,” she said. “Let’s pack a picnic lunch and eat at the beach.” Oh yeah. I get it. Simplify. Then I thought: What a great idea! The funny thing is, we’ve lived here for seven years—only a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean—and we've only done this once or twice. So we packed some turkey breast sandwiches, sliced apples, left-over coleslaw and potato salad, then drove a few minutes to a public-access beach. It was low tide, and gentle waves were rolling in. We had picked a beautiful sunny day, 73 degrees F with a mild westerly wind. We found an empty bench overlooking the beach. We enjoyed the scene a while before eating. A nice variety of birds were there. A hoard of ring-bill gulls were circling and screaming, landing when they thought they could get a handout. One laughing gull with summer plumage—a black head—stood out in the crowd. We also saw fish crows, brown pelicans, double-crested cormorants and sanderlings on the beach and a loggerhead shrike and Eurasian collared doves in the grassy park behind us. In the distance, a power boat motored south, and a sail boat drifted north. An Ernest Hemingway look-alike played with his four-year-old granddaughter in the sand. A mother and her daughter took turns applying sunscreen to each other’s backs. Several boys played in the surf. Some other children were making a sand sculpture of an alligator. We took our time eating lunch. The fish crows squawked. Slightly smaller than the American crow, the fish crow has a nasal version of "caw," which sounds like "awnk." A large sea turtle surfaced momentarily not too far from the beach. The sun warmed my face, and a gentle breeze tickled the back of my neck. In my heart was the blossoming love of a small boy, and the memory of his mother's touch. I will never take this for granted. On the way back to the car, we stopped in an ice-cream shop and got a great big Heath bar cookie and split it. Simplify, simplify! Ha! I’d rather eat a homemade sandwich on that bench than have lunch in any restaurant in town.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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