The Tide Is Taking Something You Can’t Get Back

Picture this.

You're standing barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is heavy with sodium, the sky decorated in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The waves battle ahead, styling and breaking at your feet, before slipping calmly back in the depths.

But this isn't just water pressing you.

Since every tide… bears memory.

The exact same wave that brushes against your legs tonight when taken around worlds you'll never know. It hidden forgotten towns, cooled lava because it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned woods that existed before people ever wanted strolling upright. It carried the ashes of fires that burnt out a lot of years ago. It's used the bones of sailors who vanished in to the night time, their comments swallowed by breeze and water.

And today it touches you.

The wave takes items of the entire world with it each time it retreats — grains of mud from hills that dropped long ago, shells that once sheltered lives smaller than a fingernail, fragments of rock and glass used easy from generations of tumbling. Where do they're going? To the areas we can not see. Into trenches deeper than Everest is large, into black canyons wherever gentle hasn't handled, into currents that range the globe like arteries.

The wave covers every thing it collects, burying the world's memories in a stop too vast for all of us to break.

We inform ourselves we understand it. We chart its habits, construct surfaces and harbors to struggle it, title the hours when it will increase and fall. But the tide doesn't value our measurements. It never belonged to us. It concentrates simply to the moon.

That light cat in the sky, distant and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every time of every day. The water Planet toward it, growing to generally meet its unseen hand. And once the moon converts away, the water comes back. That silent tug-of-war has shaped the world for billions of years. Also the deepest seas are tethered to anything beyond themselves.

Yet the hold is changing.

It's creeping further inland now. Glaciers are reduction in to their depths, heating seas are swelling their human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing item by piece. Islands we after thought eternal are actually gone, paid off to only titles on previous maps.

And here's the truth many people don't want to face: the tide will not end for us.

We call it disaster. The tide calls it nothing at all. It really remains, because it generally has, using and providing, sculpting and erasing. It's removed whole continents before. It will do so again.

Is it possible to imagine the near future?

The sea sheets on the towns we built. Highways disappear underneath the dunes, their asphalt damaged and broken like old bone. Systems fall in to the surf, turning in to reefs wherever fish drift through quiet glass halls. Monuments fall, shattered and dispersed till they're indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Whole civilizations are reduced to pieces, overly enthusiastic by currents therefore solid we could never swimming against them.

And when it occurs, the hold won't roar. It will not rage. It won't mourn.

It only will remember.

Because that is what the hold does. It is the planet's memory. Every life, every hurricane, every reduction is folded in to its depths and moved forward. The tide has seen whole sides rise and fall. It knows points no human language could ever hold.

But the tide is not just a thief. It is just a sculptor.

It produces life to the shore. It provides nutrients to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It shapes the sides of the earth, removing sharp stones in to smooth stones, remaking shores with every breath. Minus the wave, the planet's pulse might falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines would wither.

Probably this is exactly why we are drawn to it.

We visit the water's edge without generally understanding why. Children chase the retreating waves, laughing, then shriek when it rushes back toward them. Adults remain at the shoreline for hours, hypnotized by the rhythm, allowing the sound of their lives slip away. There is anything timeless in the tide's air — something which calls to the portion folks that remembers wherever we came from.

Since we came from the water once.

The hold carried living onto the land. It cradled the first sensitive creatures that dared to crawl from the shallows. And possibly this is exactly why we experience so little standing before it now — not since it will take sets from people, but because in certain strong, unspoken way, we all know it offered us everything first.

Stand there good enough, and you'll begin to notice the details. The quiet tug at your legs because it pulls away. The hiss of pockets collapsing in the foam. The light, nearly human sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

If you listen directly, you could hear the wave telling you a truth:

“Nothing you realize is permanent.

But nothing is actually missing, either.”

1 day, the wave may move around the planet as though we were never here. The names of our towns, the boundaries we struggled wars to guard, the monuments we created to overcome time — everything is likely to be taken out, melted, and carried to the deep.

And yet… there is a strange ease in that.

As the hold reminds us that individuals are section of anything larger than ourselves. Something which does not require us, but holds us all the same. Everything we do, every thing we construct, every air we take becomes part of its memory. The hold keeps it, even when we are gone.

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

But next time you're at the seaside, stop. Feel the pull at your feet. View the dunes draw lines in the sand, then remove them without hesitation. Remember that exactly the same wave touched lives you'll never meet and can feel lives extended after yours.

It doesn't matter if you forget.

The tide won't.

The tides won't tell us their secrets.

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