A Happy Lifestyle Choice
Flip flops are an essential part of our wardrobes and often the best choice for footwear. Most of the time, if we step out of our homes, we need footwear. To go barefoot is ideal but, practically, we often need some protection from surfaces and temperature and social constrictions. There are many good reasons (we will remind ourselves here of the many reasons), adopting flip flops is the best choice for our feet, Oh for so, so, so many occasions.
Flip Flops Can Be a Happy Choice
There are always choices of footwear: tennis shoes, boots, snazzy heels, and full-strapped sandals, but flip flops are often just happier. Flip flops are barefoot with a nod to the need for something down there. Little extra is strapped onto flip flops not. Little support is offered to your feet. Nothing is extra cushioning or protection. The flip flop leaves you nearly whole between you and your day. They are that near edge to being barefoot. It’s not unimportant to feel slightly exposed, to feel the breeze between your toes, even to know the vulnerability and proximity of the foot to the floor, pavement, rock, sand, or grass. You might stub your toe wearing your flip flops (it’s possible), you might feel slightly underdressed walking into some store or restaurant, you might get a little chilly as night falls, but I believe your chances of being happier and closer to the ground do in fact increase.
Adoption of Flip Flops
Flip flops and the entire approach to wearing them may be new to you. Try it. First, you try it obviously to walk to the beach. Most everyone wears them to and from the beach. Now, consider adopting and expanding the beach flip flop experience to the boardwalk, to the nearby cafe, and to the indoor eatery. Then, perhaps the car trip, the stop at the grocery store, the dog park play, and the walk with a slightly unknown destination. The deliberate act of adopting the flip flop as a regular choice in footwear, or at least a distinct possibility of doing so, can be your goal in being simply a bit more present. One outing by outing, excursion by excursion, it becomes a healthy choice, or even a non choice, a sliding into your flip flops before you consider if you may even need more shoe or boot.
Flip Flops Are Not Sandals
For our way of thinking, flip flops are barely footwear–they are nearly barefoot. Sandals, on the other hand, are shoes and boots with some pieces of fabric missing for increased ventilation. Sandals are deconstructed shoes or boots. They are for nerds (said with love–I’m a nerd!). With socks, sandals are wonderful on a cold day. Sandals, particularly quality leather ones, are cool and chic for dressier occasions and some moods. They can be, in fact, athletic wear with support and protection, and are perfect for specific outdoor activities of long hikes, tidal pool exploration, and real climbs. The flip flop, however, is a different category and for another world. Flip flops lower expectations and slow the pace. What’s the hurry? Where are you going?
Flip Flops – If You Can’t Take the Heat
The world has some heat these days. Given season and location, you will experience extreme heat on the feet. You may live closer to the equator and feel the heat year around. You may be traveling, hopefully for pleasure, to a hot place. To state the obvious, you may be skipping off to the beach. Flip flops are the ground troops, the “go-to,” the default vocabulary for the beach and for other hot surfaces, too. You need to walk across that parking lot, you wish to cross the roof of the at garden party at the top of the club, you want to slide by the gang at the pool party, and finally, you must navigate the sandy beach at mid day. Sometimes the sand is too hot for bare feet. You and friends see the perfect spot at the beach to pitch your umbrella, to set up camp for the day, at the edge of the water, but it is hot hot hot and you need your flip flops. This is where the essence of this adopted footwear becomes simple and required.
One day at the famous Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we stood on the sidewalk and gazed at the expanse of the beach. Not the long length (and it is long) but the vast GIRTH of the beach. It is wide and deep. Standing on the boardwalk, oh, friends and I saw our spot on the be
ach waiting for us. Not too crowded. Not too isolated. Near the water but far enough away to stay put when the tide came in. We could see our home for the day. But it was December and summer and hot. The sand was sizzling and we couldn’t stand on the sidewalk, let alone stride towards the water, without our flip flops. Interestingly, beautifully and casually and delightfully, the city did provide some long drawn-out hoses every half kilometer or so, which trailed from boardwalk and the water spigots all the way out to nearly the surf. The hoses were perforated and provided a miracle wet path of cool, skinny, sand, and beach goers could tightrope it down the hose-watered trail to the expanse of the beach. Fun. Indeed. Still, we all had our flip flops for later, for a diversion off of that watery trail, for a return to the hot sidewalk. Flip flops for all. Flip flops at the beach. To the essence of the flip flop.
Who Would Have Thought?
Some readers of this may be chuckling (I hope, with patience) for me stating the obvious: Flip flops are not sandals or shoes. Flip flops take us to the beach. They take us to a barefoot approach to life. Flip flops really highlight simple utility and a barefoot freedom. Still, I myself had to learn of the flip flop and when and how to wear them. Now, I can and do enjoy them. There is always something of the beach with us in flip flops.
I hope this website will quickly introduce you to both the practicality and the beach mindset of choosing flip flops. More often than not your choice of footwear can be flip flops. The small seemingly inconsequential choice can be the foundation for a happier, slightly more exposed, lifestyle. Barefoot is best, sure. And then, there are flip flops, if need be. You don’t have to put on shoes yet.