Every Wave Is Carrying Away a Piece of Our World

 Picture this.

You are ranking barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is large with salt, the atmosphere painted in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The dunes competition ahead, styling and breaking at your feet, before falling calmly back in the depths.

But that is not only water touching you.

Because every tide… holds memory.

The same hold that brushes against your ankles tonight when swept around worlds you may never know. It buried forgotten towns, cooled lava because it built from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that endured before humans actually wanted strolling upright. It carried the ashes of shoots that burned out one thousand years ago. It has presented the bones of sailors who faded in to the night, their voices swallowed by breeze and water.

And now it touches you.

The tide requires bits of the world with it each time it retreats — grains of mud from hills that dropped long ago, shells that after sheltered lives smaller than a fingernail, fragments of rock and glass used easy from generations of tumbling. Where do they're going? To the places we cannot see. Into trenches greater than Everest is large, into black canyons wherever light has never handled, in to currents that circle the planet like arteries.

The tide covers everything it gathers, burying the world's thoughts in a silence also substantial for us to break.

We tell ourselves we realize it. We graph its designs, construct walls and harbors to battle it, name the hours when it will increase and fall. But the wave doesn't care about our measurements. It hasn't belonged to us. It concentrates simply to the moon.

That light ghost in the sky, distant and untouchable, draws at the oceans every time of each and every day. The water Planet toward it, climbing to meet their hidden hand. And once the moon turns away, the water comes back. This quiet tug-of-war has designed the planet for billions of years. Actually the deepest seas are tethered to something beyond themselves.

Yet the hold is changing.

It's creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are melting in to their depths, warming seas are swelling its human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing part by piece. Islands we after believed endless already are removed, reduced to only titles on old maps.

And here's the truth most people do not need to manage: the wave will not stop for us.

We contact it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It simply remains, as it generally has, taking and providing, sculpting and erasing. It has erased entire continents before. It is going to do so again.

Would you envision the long run?

The sea sheets within the cities we built. Highways disappear underneath the dunes, their asphalt damaged and broken like old bone. Towers collapse in to the search, turning into reefs wherever fish drift through quiet glass halls. Monuments crumble, destroyed and dispersed till they're indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Whole civilizations are reduced to pieces, carried away by currents therefore strong we could never swim against them.

And when it happens, the wave won't roar. It will not rage. It won't mourn.

It only will remember.

Because that's what the wave does. It's the planet's memory. Every life, every surprise, every loss is folded into their depths and moved forward. The wave has observed entire worlds rise and fall. It knows points number human language could ever hold.

Nevertheless the tide is not only a thief. It is really a sculptor.

It delivers living to the shore. It carries nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It designs the edges of the planet earth, smoothing sharp rocks into soft stones, remaking beaches with every breath. With no hold, the planet's heartbeat might falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines might wither.

Probably this is exactly why we are attracted to it.

We go to the water's edge without always understanding why. Kids chase the retreating dunes, laughing, then shriek when it rushes right back toward them. People sit at the shoreline for hours, hypnotized by the flow, making the sound of these lives slip away. There is something endless in the tide's air — a thing that calls to the part folks that recalls wherever we came from.

Because we originated from the water once.

The wave carried living onto the land. It cradled the very first sensitive animals that dared to examine from the shallows. And probably this is exactly why we feel so little position before it today — maybe not because it will take sets from people, but since in some heavy, unspoken way, we all know it offered us every thing first.

Stay there good enough, and you'll start to spot the details. The calm whip at your legs because it brings away. The hiss of bubbles crumbling in the foam. The light, almost human sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

If you listen closely, you could hear the tide telling you a truth:

“Nothing you realize is permanent.

But nothing is actually missing, either.”

1 day, the tide may throw over the world like we were never here. The titles of our cities, the boundaries we struggled conflicts to safeguard, the monuments we built to overcome time — the whole thing is going to be taken away, melted, and moved to the deep.

And yet… there is a strange comfort in that.

Since the wave tells us that people are section of something larger than ourselves. Something that doesn't require us, but supports people the same. Every thing we do, everything we construct, every air we get becomes section of its memory. The wave keeps it, also once we are gone.

You will never know all that it carries. None people will.

But next time you are at the seaside, stop. Have the draw at your feet. View the waves draw lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Understand that the same hold handled lives you may never meet and may touch lives extended following yours.

It does not matter if you forget.

The tide won't.

The tides won't reveal their secrets.

But if you are quiet enough, you may experience them in your bones.