This Secret Buried Beneath the Tides Will Outlive Us

Picture this.

You are position barefoot at the edge of the ocean. The air is heavy with sodium, the sky painted in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The dunes competition forward, curling and breaking at the feet, before falling silently back into the depths.

But that isn't just water touching you.

Because every tide… provides memory.

The same wave that brushes against your legs tonight after taken over sides you may never know. It hidden neglected towns, cooled lava because it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that endured before humans ever imagined strolling upright. It moved the ashes of shoots that burnt out one thousand decades ago. It has held the bones of sailors who faded in to the night, their comments swallowed by breeze and water.

And today it details you.

The hold requires items of the entire world with it every time it retreats — grains of mud from hills that dropped sometime ago, covers that when sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, pieces of stone and glass used easy from centuries of tumbling. Wherever do they go? To the areas we can not see. Into trenches deeper than Everest is large, into black canyons wherever gentle has never handled, in to currents that range the globe like arteries.

The tide hides everything it gathers, burying the world's thoughts in a stop also huge for people to break.

We inform ourselves we understand it. We chart their habits, construct walls and harbors to struggle it, title the hours when it'll increase and fall. However the hold doesn't value our measurements. It has never belonged to us. It listens simply to the moon.

That soft cat in the atmosphere, distant and untouchable, draws at the oceans every time of each and every day. The water Planet toward it, rising to meet its invisible hand. And once the moon converts out, the water falls back. This silent tug-of-war has shaped the world for billions of years. Even the deepest seas are connected to anything beyond themselves.

Yet the hold is changing.

It is creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are reduction into its depths, warming waters are swelling its body, and shorelines are vanishing bit by piece. Islands we after thought timeless already are removed, reduced to only titles on old maps.

And here's the facts many people don't need to face: the hold won't end for us.

We contact it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It just remains, because it always has, using and providing, building and erasing. It has erased whole continents before. It will do therefore again.

Would you envision the near future?

The ocean rolls on the towns we built. Roads disappear beneath the waves, their asphalt damaged and broken like old bone. Towers fail into the search, turning in to reefs where fish move through silent glass halls. Monuments fall, shattered and spread until they're indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Entire civilizations are reduced to parts, overly enthusiastic by currents so solid we could never move against them.

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

It only will remember.

Because that is what the hold does. It is the planet's memory. Every life, every surprise, every reduction is flattened into their depths and moved forward. The wave has watched whole sides increase and fall. It understands points number human language could ever hold.

However the tide is not only a thief. It is a sculptor.

It provides living to the shore. It holds nutritional elements to estuaries and marshlands wherever new creatures are born. It forms the ends of the earth, removing sharp rocks into smooth rocks, remaking beaches with every breath. With no hold, the planet's pulse would falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines would wither.

Maybe that's why we're interested in it.

We visit the water's edge without generally understanding why. Young ones chase the retreating dunes, laughing, then shriek when it rushes right back toward them. Adults sit at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the flow, allowing the sound of the lives slip away. There's something endless in the tide's air — something that calls to the portion folks that remembers where we came from.

Because we originated from the water once.

The wave moved life onto the land. It cradled the first sensitive creatures that dared to get from the shallows. And possibly this is exactly why we sense so small ranking before it today — maybe not because normally it takes sets from us, but because in certain serious, unspoken way, we know it gave people everything first.

Stand there long enough, and you'll begin to spot the details. The quiet tug at your ankles because it brings away. The hiss of pockets crumbling in the foam. The weak, nearly human sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

If you hear strongly, you may hear the tide letting you know a truth:

“Nothing you know is permanent.

But nothing is really lost, either.”

One day, the hold will roll around the entire world as though we were never here. The names of our towns, the borders we struggled wars to guard, the monuments we developed to overcome time — all of it is going to be swept away, melted, and carried in to the deep.

And yet… there's an odd ease in that.

Because the wave tells people that individuals are part of anything bigger than ourselves. Something that does not require us, but supports us all the same. Every thing we do, everything we construct, every air we take becomes element of its memory. The tide maintains it, also whenever we are gone.

You will never know all that it carries. Nothing of us will.

But the next occasion you are at the seaside, stop. Have the pull at your feet. View the dunes bring lines in the sand, then eliminate them without hesitation. Remember that the same tide handled lives you'll never match and can touch lives extended after yours.

It does not subject if you forget.

The hold won't.

The tides won't reveal their secrets.

But when you're quiet enough, you may sense them in your bones.