I was feeling a little off the other week. So I did what I usually do: I went to the ocean.
I put my feet in the sand and sat near the water.
The waves came in. Went out. A few joggers. A man with a metal detector. Children running around further up the sand.
Then something moved differently than everything else.
A woman in her 30s in the ocean. She was jumping into the waves. Not carefully. Not strategically. Just throwing herself at the waves—arms out, completely airborne for half a second—and coming up laughing.
She caught a wave wrong. Tumbled. Came up sputtering, hair everywhere, completely undone.
She laughed harder.
Nobody else turned to look. I couldn’t look away.
Here was this woman living life at full volume—moved entirely by the ocean she loves and completely unself-conscious about it.
She didn’t need to be understood. She didn’t explain herself. She was just—herself. And she ended up mentoring me that day in a way I didn’t know I needed.
We know what mentorship is supposed to look like. Robin Williams and Matt Damon in a cramped office in Good Will Hunting. The mentor leans in, the mentee leans in, and both of them know exactly what’s happening. This is the thing being given, this is the thing being received. There’s a formality to it. Someone asked, and someone answered.
But that woman never looked at me. Didn’t even know I existed. She wasn’t trying to show me anything. And yet what she carried crossed the beach and landed in me—the frequency of being fully alive, reckless and laughing, throwing yourself at what will overturn you anyway. That reached me without permission, without a transaction, without either of us signing up for it.
That’s the oldest kind of mentorship. The kind that has nothing to do with expertise and everything to do with aliveness.
You’ve probably experienced this without naming it. The person who laughed at their own joke before they even finished telling it, completely unguarded. The friend who kept making her art even when no one was paying attention. The stranger on the train reading a book with such absorption that you went home and finally picked up the one on your nightstand.
None of them knew. All of them taught.
And here’s what this means for you:
You don’t have to wait.
You don’t have to accumulate enough wisdom before you can be an example to someone else. You just have to be yourself—fully, without performing, without shrinking.
Someone is always watching. And what they’re watching for isn’t your credentials. It’s whether you’re actually living.
When you show up in your full frequency—committed to your becoming, unashamed of your weird enthusiasms—you become a living permission slip for everyone in your radius.
The woman who tumbled in the waves didn’t know she saved the morning for a stranger on the sand. She was just being herself.
That’s how aliveness travels.
The most generous thing you can offer isn’t advice. It’s to be so fully alive that the people around you remember they can be too.
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