Go Sit by the Water

August 20, 2026

On sand, sunlight, and the peace you have been looking for

Tobia Bradley, CDC  ·  Certified Divorce Coach  ·  Ashby Jones & Associates, LLC

I want to give you something to look forward to.

I say that on purpose. When you’re in the middle of something this hard, the days start running together into one long stretch of getting through, and a person can only live in that for so long before something in her starts to dim. Having one thing out ahead of you, marked on the calendar, waiting, changes how the weeks in between feel. Not because it fixes anything. Because it gives you somewhere to look besides down. The women I’ve watched come through this best almost always have something small on the horizon, and it’s usually not a big trip or a milestone. It’s a Saturday.

Close your eyes for a second and picture yourself on the beach.

You’re sitting on the sand. Your shoes are off somewhere behind you and your feet are dug in, and the sand underneath is cooler than the sand on top, and your toes keep finding that line. The sun is on your face and your arms and the tops of your shoulders. The waves come in, and then they go back out, and then they come in again.

Stay there a moment longer. Let yourself actually feel it.

Now tell me honestly how long it’s been since you felt anything like that.

Go get in the car.

One | Pick a Saturday and Drive to the Coast

Here it is, in full: pick a day, drive to the beach, and sit there.

You are two hours from the ocean. That’s the whole obstacle, and it’s a smaller one than it’s been pretending to be.

Charleston. Folly. Edisto. Isle of Palms if you want people around, Hunting Island if you don’t. Pick the one you like and put it on the calendar the way you’d put down anything that mattered, with a date and a time, because the things without times don’t happen.

Then go, and do nothing when you get there.

You’re not walking it for exercise. You’re not returning calls with a nice view behind you. You’re not stopping for two hours on the way to somewhere else. You’re going to sit down in front of the ocean, close your eyes, and stay a while.

Bring a towel and some water. That’s the entire preparation. The second this turns into a project with a checklist and a cooler and a schedule, it becomes one more thing you’re managing, and managing is exactly what you’re driving out there to stop doing.

And go early if you can. Morning sun is gentler, the beach is emptier, and you’ll get the best hours of it before the day fills up.

What it feels like

Start with your feet, because that’s usually where it starts.

Sand is warm on top and cool underneath, and there’s something about pushing your toes down into it that a body understands immediately. No one has to teach you to do it. You sit down and your feet just start working at it on their own, and for the first time in a long time some small part of you is busy with something that has nothing to do with anything.

Then the sun finds your face. If you’ve been running cold and tight for months, and most women in this season have, the warmth lands like something you’d forgotten was available. It gets into your shoulders. It sits on your eyelids and turns the inside of them a soft orange. Your jaw comes unclenched somewhere in there and you don’t notice it happening.

And underneath all of it, the sound. In, and out. In, and out. Never quite the same twice and never really different either.

That’s what does it, I think. Your mind goes looking for a pattern in that sound the way it goes looking for a pattern in everything now, and there isn’t one to find, so after a few minutes it quietly gives up and lets go. It’s the only place I know of where letting go doesn’t take any effort. The water does it for you.

Salt on your mouth. Wind moving your hair around. Somebody’s kids shrieking about something way down the beach, and not one single part of it is your responsibility.

Your shoulders come down without asking you first.

What’s actually happening

Here’s the part I want you to pay attention to, because it matters more than the science.

You have been in a state of alarm for a long time now, and that has a cost you may not have added up. When a body stays braced for months, it forgets it has another setting. What an afternoon like this does is remind it. The warmth and the sound and the wide open space give your nervous system permission to stand down for a few hours, and it will take that permission, because it’s been waiting for it.

That’s the healing part, and I don’t use that word loosely. Something in you actually repairs out there. Not your circumstances. You. The part of you that has been running on nothing since winter gets a few hours of genuine rest, and you can feel the difference on the drive home in a way that’s hard to describe and impossible to miss.

And then there’s what comes with it.

Somewhere in the second hour, with your eyes still closed, you’ll notice you’ve stopped arguing with anyone in your head. The conversation you’ve been rehearsing for three weeks has gone quiet. And into that quiet, usually sideways and without any warning, the thing you actually think will surface.

Not the thing you’re supposed to think. Not what your sister said or what your mother would do. What you want.

I’ve had women come back from an afternoon like this having decided something they’d circled for a month, and almost none of them can tell me when it happened. It didn’t feel like deciding. It felt like finally hearing themselves.

That’s the clarity people are chasing, and here’s the thing worth knowing: you cannot get it by trying harder. Clarity doesn’t come from more thinking. It comes from a mind quiet enough that what you already know can float up on its own.

The answer has been in you for a while. It just hasn’t had anywhere quiet to come up.

That’s the gift this one has to offer, and it’s different from what the walk gives you.

That water was there before your marriage, and it will be there long after all of this is settled and behind you. It has kept the same rhythm through every hard year anybody has ever had. Sit next to something that old and that steady with your eyes closed for an afternoon, and your situation stops being the biggest thing in the world. It goes back to being what it actually is, which is one hard season inside one long life that still has a great deal of good ahead of it.

You’ll pick it all back up when you get home. That’s fine. You’ll pick it up rested, and steadier, and quite often with something settled that wasn’t settled that morning.

Two | Close Your Eyes

This one is small, and it’s the piece most people skip.

Actually close them.

There’s a pull to look at the view, because it’s pretty and you drove all that way. But sight is the sense that keeps you managing things. Eyes open, you’re still scanning and assessing and noticing.

Close them and the rest of it gets much louder. The warmth, the sound, the sand, the wind. That’s when it stops being scenery and starts being something happening to you.

Ten minutes with your eyes closed will do more than an hour with them open.

You don’t have to watch anything. Not today.

Three | Leave the Phone in the Car

And this one is practical, so I’ll be plain about it.

The phone will undo the whole afternoon if you let it.

Nothing dramatic has to happen. One glance at a message and you’re back inside all of it, shoulders up around your ears again, and it takes another half hour to get back out. You didn’t drive all that way to bring him along.

Leave it in the glove box. Nothing that arrives in the next two hours will be worse for waiting.

Start small

If you take one thing from this, take the first one, and put it on the calendar before you close this page.

Pick a Saturday. Pick the beach. Write it down with a time attached, because the things without times don’t happen.

You’re not solving anything out there, at least not on purpose. You’re giving a tired mind and a tired body a few hours of something warm and steady and easy, which you have not had in a very long time, and which you need more than you probably think you do.

Go put your feet in the sand and close your eyes.

The water doesn’t know a thing about any of this. It’ll just keep coming in, and going out, the way it always has, and the way you’re going to.

A gentle note: an afternoon by the water is a small kindness, not a substitute for real support. If the heavy days are stacking up faster than the steady ones, please talk to someone, whether that’s a therapist, your doctor, or a friend who shows up. And nothing here is legal advice. Questions about your case, your rights, or your agreement belong with your attorney.

With love, Tobia

Tobia Bradley, CDC  ·  Certified Divorce Coach

ASHBY JONES & ASSOCIATES, LLC

Lexington  |  Columbia  |  Charleston  ·  ashbyjoneslaw.com