The Ocean Remembers Everything

Image this.

You're standing barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is heavy with salt, the sky decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The dunes competition forward, styling and breaking at your feet, before sliding calmly back to the depths.

But this isn't just water touching you.

Because every tide… carries memory.

The exact same wave that brushes against your ankles today once taken around sides you may never know. It buried neglected towns, cooled lava because it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that endured before individuals actually dreamed of strolling upright. It carried the ashes of fires that burned out a lot of years ago. It's presented the bones of sailors who faded in to the night, their comments swallowed by wind and water.

And today it details you.

The wave takes items of the entire world with it each time it retreats — cereals of mud from hills that dropped sometime ago, shells that once sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, pieces of stone and glass used easy from centuries of tumbling. Wherever do they're going? To the areas we can not see. Into trenches deeper than Everest is large, in to dark canyons wherever gentle never touched, in to currents that group the planet like arteries.

The tide covers everything it collects, burying the world's memories in a stop too large for all of us to break.

We tell ourselves we understand it. We graph their designs, construct surfaces and harbors to struggle it, name the hours when it'll increase and fall. However the hold does not worry about our measurements. It never belonged to us. It listens simply to the moon.

That pale ghost in the sky, remote and untouchable, draws at the oceans every moment of each day. The water Planet toward it, rising to meet its unseen hand. And when the moon turns away, the water comes back. That silent tug-of-war has designed the planet for billions of years. Actually the deepest seas are connected to anything beyond themselves.

The wave is changing.

It's creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are melting in to their depths, warming waters are swelling their body, and shorelines are vanishing part by piece. Islands we once believed eternal already are removed, reduced to nothing but names on previous maps.

And here's the reality a lot of people do not need to face: the wave won't end for us.

We contact it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It simply remains, since it always has, getting and giving, building and erasing. It's deleted whole continents before. It is going to do therefore again.

Can you envision the future?

The water rolls over the towns we built. Roads disappear beneath the dunes, their asphalt broken and broken like previous bone. Systems fail in to the search, turning in to reefs where fish move through quiet glass halls. Monuments fall, broken and spread until they're indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Whole civilizations are paid off to parts, carried away by currents therefore powerful we could never swimming against them.

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

It only will remember.

Because that is what the hold does. It's the planet's memory. Every living, every hurricane, every reduction is folded in to its depths and moved forward. The tide has seen whole worlds increase and fall. It knows points number individual language could actually hold.

Nevertheless the wave is not only a thief. It is just a sculptor.

It offers life to the shore. It bears vitamins to estuaries and marshlands where new creatures are born. It designs the edges of our planet, removing sharp rocks in to smooth stones, remaking shores with every breath. Minus the wave, the planet's pulse would falter. Oceans could stagnate. Coastlines could wither.

Perhaps this is exactly why we're drawn to it.

We head to the water's side without generally understanding why. Kiddies chase the retreating waves, joking, then shriek when it rushes back toward them. People stay at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the beat, allowing the noise of their lives slip away. There is something timeless in the tide's breath — a thing that calls to the part of us that recalls where we came from.

Because we originated from the water once.

The wave moved living onto the land. It cradled the initial delicate creatures that dared to crawl from the shallows. And probably this is exactly why we feel therefore little position before it today — maybe not because it can take sets from people, but because in some deep, unspoken way, we all know it offered people everything first.

Stay there good enough, and you'll start to notice the details. The calm tug at your ankles as it draws away. The hiss of pockets collapsing in the foam. The weak, almost human sigh because it exhales onto the sand.

In the event that you hear strongly, you may hear the wave telling you a reality:

“Nothing you realize is permanent.

But nothing is really missing, either.”

One day, the wave can throw around the world as though we were never here. The titles of our cities, the borders we struggled wars to protect, the monuments we built to outlive time — everything is going to be swept away, softened, and moved to the deep.

And yet… there is a strange ease in that.

Since the hold tells people that individuals are section of anything larger than ourselves. Something which does not need people, but holds people the same. Everything we do, everything we build, every air we take becomes section of its memory. The hold maintains it, also once we are gone.

You will never know all that it carries. Nothing folks will.

But the next time you are at the seaside, stop. Feel the pull at your feet. Watch the dunes bring lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Understand that the same tide handled lives you'll never match and can feel lives long following yours.

It doesn't matter in the event that you forget.

The hold won't.

The tides won't reveal their secrets.

But if you are calm enough, you may sense them in your bones.