The Umbrella

A beach umbrella, two best friends, and a completely uncontrollable case of laughter. Charlotte shares a hilarious beach-day disaster and reflects on why being responsible doesn't mean we have to take life so seriously. A Sunday Seed about laughter, friendship, joy, and remembering to enjoy your life while you're living it.

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Hey, friend. Welcome to Send a Seed. I'm Charlotte Edwards, and I believe small seeds create big impact. Each week, we'll plant one. Let's dig in Over the summer, I was at the beach with two of my girlfriends. It had been one of those great beach days where we hadn't really done much of anything. We sat around, talked, enjoyed the sun, jumped in some waves, and spent the day together. Toward the end of the afternoon, the wind started picking up, and we decided it was probably time to pack up everything. Now, if you've ever tried to take down a beach umbrella when the wind is blowing, you know this can become a full contact sport pretty quickly. So as I'm wrestling with this thing, trying to get it closed, when one of my friends tells me, "Why don't you turn it the other way and let the wind work with you?" Which at first seems pretty reasonable. So I turned the umbrella, and immediately, the entire thing wrapped around her head. I mean, completely engulfed her. All I could see was this giant umbrella where my friend used to be, and it looked like a squid had eaten her head, and I lost it. I was trying to help her, but I was laughing so hard that I was basically useless. I turned the umbrella back towards myself, which apparently was also not the solution, because now the entire thing flipped inside out. At this point, I can't talk, I can't breathe, and I'm certainly not helping anyone. My friend starts laughing at me, and she has one of those laughs where once she gets going, she started snorting. Well, now it's all over, because there is nothing that will make you laugh harder than you're already laughing uncontrollably when you start hearing one of your best friends snort. And we were so caught up in this moment that we completely forgot that we're standing on a beach full of other people until this young guy walks over to help us. I'm pretty sure he felt sorry for the middle-aged women who'd clearly lost a fight with a beach umbrella. So he comes over to rescue us, and somehow the umbrella ends up dropping down and encasing both myself and, and this guy. I couldn't even explain what was happening because I was laughing so hard I couldn't even get the words out. And at one point, I was laughing so hard I thought I was gonna pee in my pants. And then I realized I wasn't wearing any pants. I was in a bathing suit which somehow made the situation both funnier and significantly more concerning. Eventually, we got the umbrella down, and I don't even really remember exactly how it happened. But I remember standing there with my friends, tears running down my face, my stomach hurting, barely able to catch my breath I love that kind of laugh. It's the kind of laugh where your whole body gets involved, and it takes you a minute, or probably five minutes for me at this point, to pull yourself back together. When I think about that whole day at the beach, that's the only part I remember. I couldn't tell you what we talked about all those hours. I don't remember what snacks or what we ate or what time we got there. I just remember the umbrella swallowing my friend's face and hearing her snort. And as I've gotten older and life's gotten fuller and busier, there are people I care about, work that matters to me, things that need to get done, and usually something is constantly running through my head about what to do next. And most of us get pretty good at carrying all of that but I don't want being a responsible adult to mean becoming a serious person all the time. I think sometimes we can confuse those two things. Having hard things go on doesn't cancel our ability to laugh either. Both can be true at the same time. That afternoon, everything was still waiting for me when I left the beach. Nothing had been solved. My life hadn't suddenly become any easier. I had just forgotten all about it for a few minutes because I was laughing with two of the people I love. And I think that's what I've come to appreciate about laughter as I get older. It doesn't require life to be easy first. You don't have to finish everything, solve everything, or wait until life settles down before you're allowed to enjoy it. Because when does life ever really settle down? I don't wanna get so busy managing my life that I forget to actually enjoy being in it. And I don't think enjoying our lives always requires doing something extraordinary. Sometimes it's just being present enough to notice when something good, funny, or completely ridiculous is happening right in front of us. I wonder how many of those moments happen in an ordinary week that we barely notice because we're already thinking about whatever comes next That's your seed. Now go plant something good