Zadie Smith's Find Your Beach

In “Find Your Beach”, a narrative essay written by Zadie Smith, the writer expresses her belief that is one is adamant enough, one can arrive at their beach - a paradise-like environment that people dream of, but is believed to be very hard to obtain. The idea of a person’s “beach” being hard to discover can be observed through Smith’s personal background, as it is almost mythical for this English writer living in Soho, Manhattan to come by a beach. What I took away from Smith’s text is the idea that when you finally arrive at your beach, “sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next”. Overall, I interpreted one’s beach being defined as a person’s happiness. It is something we all have the potential to posses

Here, sitting on this bench, I found ten minutes of paradise. And like Smith says in her essay, I eventually began thinking about what comes next. What other beaches can I find? In my perspective, a beach can only last for a certain duration of time, and once you leave that environment, it will never be the beach that it was before, because ultimately, life is constantly changing. Once you accept this concept, it is easier to understand that happiness is essentially temporary, however the number of opportunities to pursue happiness is infinite. This in turn enables people to go out and find multiple short-term beaches without the mindset of constantly being on the outlook for this one perfect paradise.

Essentially, Smith advertises her views of how one can obtain happiness through her narrative essay “Find Your Beach”. In her writing, Smith publicizes the importance of actively trying to find your beach and believes that being aware of your surroundings will in turn lead to more opportunities for one to find their beach. Smith also emphasizes that the beach symbolizes a person’s state of mind and that these emotions can be achieved anywhere as long as that person is in the right state of