A Little Life (Un)List: For an End and a Beginning

Grab a coffee and join me at the edges. xoxo

Little Life Lists are for the complicated, unruly things life throws at us. I encourage you to write your own, too. With coffee. xoxo

This week, we’re in Cancun…

At first, we all thought the man was dead.

Standing from the vantage point of the pool area, the ocean spread rapaciously below, we watched a lifeguard and two young women struggle with a body of a man.

Yann was first to move, racing down the steps and helping drag him from the water. The man’s head flopped and his skin was the grey of the morgue, and I hurried to pull the little boys away.

“Don’t watch, children,” I murmured into the rising horror.

The lifeguard and Yann turned the man onto his side, checking for a pulse, for breathing, and suddenly he sputtered a flume of salt water. I ran down to join the hysterical teenagers who were screaming, “Papi, Papi,” and asked someone to call a doctor.

The man was very cold, his skin pallid, and I called my oldest to bring down our towels to warm him. “Keep him awake, let’s breathe together,” were some of the words I said. I asked for people’s names.

An ATV thundered toward us. “Look, the doctor is here. He’s okay. Everything is okay.”

Four armed police exited the vehicle. No doctor.

“He’s a doctor,” one of the teenagers said, pointing at her father, who lay still and shocked, but breathing now. It was apparent he would survive, even as more police arrived, and more bystanders gathered. Someone was filming, and someone else brought the man’s wife, who went into full body shock, even as we reassured her.

The air tasted of salt. The man managed to tell us his name. The ocean, hungry still, lapped at his feet, shocking him into opening his eyes.

That deceptive peaceful blue spills into our consciousness, making us brave, and tempting us to dive in. That siren call.

By the time the paramedics arrived, both Yann and I were asking ourselves how this could have happened, stepping away from the family who no longer needed our support, stepping toward our children who were gathered close to each other, silently.

Life is uncontrollable, yet we try to control it.

Last night, I began reading Meditations for Mortals. Oliver Burkeman, one of my favourite journalists for many years now. He writes, “The list of worthwhile things you could in principle do with your time will always be vastly longer than the list of things for which you’ll have time.”

Now, as I write this, sunlight is reflecting from all that water, blinding, so we’ve retreated inside. But later, we’ll be pulled back, wanting to enter again.

Burkeman adds, “A good life isn’t clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing reality. It’s about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact—just without the background agenda of achieving full control.”

The man hadn’t been that far out—we realised that we’d seen him waving to his daughters eight or nine minutes before this all happened. How had the waves turned him from a thriving, vibrant swimmer into a man about to enter the underworld? (My youngest boys and I have listened to a lot of Greeking Out recently, so my mind is full of myths and legends.)

Perhaps it was hubris, a man believing he was a better swimmer than he was, perhaps it was simply that the ocean is far more powerful than its seduction lets us see.

The night after the near drowning, I bumped into the man’s daughter in a little shop. She told me her father spent the night in the hospital but was out and fine now.

“How did it happen?” I asked.

His daughter explained that a strong wave had knocked him, he’d hit a rock, and from there become disoriented, swimming away from the shore, getting further from safety.

As she spoke, those edges we live so close to, but hide from ourselves, all became close.

Then, when I stood with my children hours later, welcoming in 2025, fireworks cascading along the beach strip, the air alive and loud, people cheering, I imagined the man and his wife.

In my mind, they held hands, looking out to this same black ocean, touching that liminal place where we see everything we have to lose, and everything we still hold.

May your 2025 be full of beauty, creativity, joy, and occasionally lit with moments of grace.

When you spend time with me here, I am full of gratitude for you as a reader. For the next two months of our Life-Changing Book Club together, we’ll be reading Wintering by Katherine May, suggested in the comments by one of you.

Next week, we’ll talk more about all of that and I’ll find the comment! We’ve shifted based on a poll to a book every two months so we can all make it work with our lives. It’s going to be wonderful to read this with you. It’s book full of beauty and promise and in my case, I’ll be re-reading it.

For this week, I hope you’ve enjoyed hanging out over coffee together. Please share this if you did.

And tell me how you’re doing. I love hearing from you—it reminds me I’m a writer in all these wilds.

Thank you.

Sent with love,

Alice

xoxox

Tell me! What are you reading? What do you hope for in 2025?

If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked.

Join me for a coffee break on my Substack: Confessions & Coffee.

Xoxo