The Hour That Almost Didn’t Happen

St. Lucia, December 2025

Yesterday was supposed to be a workday.

I was in my apartment outside Castries, spending long stretches of time on administrative tasks—the unglamorous but necessary details of running a private practice while also planning future travels. Emails, schedules, logistics. The scaffolding that quietly holds a life like mine upright.

And yet, underneath all that productivity, my body kept making the same request:

Go to the sea.

I’ve always been drawn to the ocean.  I grew up in California, where the Pacific is never far away.  But I’m not a strong swimmer — when I was eight years old, I nearly drowned in a swimming pool accident. 

And still, the ocean has lived in me as both sanctuary and threat. I adore being in the water up to my neck. I love jumping over gentle waves, feeling the rhythm of lift and release. But a strong current still wakes something ancient in my nervous system—the fear of being carried somewhere I can’t return from.

This is what it’s like to live with both High Sensitivity and High Sensation Seeking.I long for immersion and safety. Expansion and containment. Aliveness and reassurance.

So I asked for help.

Janell, the manager of the apartment complex, offered to find a driver to take me to a nearby beach—one close to a hotel, calm water, people around. Not remote. Not wild. Just held.

Originally, I wanted to go late afternoon—around 4:00pm—for about an hour. But traffic here can be intense, and the driver didn’t want to go that late. After some back-and-forth, we renegotiated: 2:30 to 3:30.

At the time, it felt mildly inconvenient. In retrospect, it was everything.

It had been raining on and off most of the day. Janell even said, kindly but firmly, that maybe I shouldn’t go in the sea at all. But something in me felt drawn. I didn’t want to spend the entire day inside working. I wanted to experience St. Lucia—especially knowing I’d be leaving for Martinique the next day.

I checked the weather app. It said the rain had finished for the day.

That was enough.

The driver dropped me off and said he’d return in an hour. Standing barefoot on the sand, I realized I had no watch and no phone. I hadn’t wanted to leave anything unattended on the shore. Time, suddenly, wasn’t something I could manage or monitor.

I would have to trust my body instead.

There were a few people in the water—an older couple from Sweden. We began chatting the way people do when the sea softens boundaries. We talked about San Francisco. About my upcoming trip to Stockholm and the Åland Islands. About travel, and how the world can feel both vast and intimate at the same time.

They soon got out of the water, but their adult daughter—traveling with them—came in just as they left.

So the conversation continued.

We discovered, easily and without effort, that we had a great deal in common. At one point, I mentioned that I’m writing a book about a trait called High Sensitivity.

She interrupted me mid-sentence.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m one of them.”

She knew the work. She’d read Elaine Aron. She understood how the trait showed up in her life. What followed wasn’t explanation or education—it was recognition. Two nervous systems speaking the same language.

When I mentioned—almost apologetically—that I wasn’t a strong swimmer, she smiled and said something simple and grounding:

“Don’t worry. I’m a strong swimmer. I’ve got you.”

And something in my body softened.

Not because she promised anything dramatic. Not because she took charge. But because my sensitivity—which is so often framed as fragility—recognized safety when it arrived.

I stayed in the water. I relaxed a little more. I let the sea hold me without forcing myself past my limits.

Eventually, without knowing the time, I began to feel ready to get out. Almost simultaneously, Sandra said she was getting cold. It was a rare cool day—the rain had shifted the air, and the water carried that change.

We headed toward shore.

That’s when another layer of reality arrived: with my new knees still not quite strong enough to pull me through the surf, getting out of the water wasn’t simple. Thank goodness her parents were there. It took all three of them—steady, patient, unhurried—to help me make my way back onto the sand.

We stood there together, laughing a little, catching our breath.

It was exactly 3:30.

Sandra took my contact information. And right on cue, my driver arrived.

Perfectly. Quietly. Without effort.

Later, back in my apartment, the meaning began to settle in.

If the driver hadn’t renegotiated the time…If I had insisted on my original plan…If I had stayed inside working because the weather hadn’t been ideal…

I never would have met Sandra. I never would have had that hour. I never would have experienced the precise balance of safety and expansion my system was asking for.

And then—just to underline the point—the sky opened.

A tropical downpour arrived moments after I got home. Rain pouring hard enough to make it unmistakable: that window had closed.

The timing hadn’t just worked out. It had been exact.

This is one of the deepest lessons I keep learning as a Sensitive Adventurer:

Not every adjustment is a compromise. Some are invitations.

Aliveness doesn’t come from pushing past sensitivity or taming desire. It comes from listening closely enough—to my body, to timing, to life itself—to let things meet me halfway.

Yesterday, that meeting happened in the sea.