Picture this.

You are ranking barefoot at the edge of the ocean. The air is major with sodium, the air colored in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The waves race ahead, curling and breaking at the feet, before slipping calmly back to the depths.

But that is not only water touching you.

Because every tide… bears memory.

The exact same wave that brushes against your ankles tonight once swept over sides you'll never know. It hidden neglected cities, cooled lava because it spilled from newborn volcanoes, and drowned forests that existed before individuals actually wanted strolling upright. It carried the ashes of shoots that burned out a thousand decades ago. It has presented the bones of sailors who faded into the night time, their voices swallowed by breeze and water.

And now it details you.

The wave requires items of the planet with it each time it retreats — cereals of mud from mountains that fell way back when, shells that when sheltered lives smaller than a fingernail, fragments of rock and glass worn easy from generations of tumbling. Where do they go? To the areas we can not see. In to trenches deeper than Everest is tall, in to black canyons where gentle has never moved, in to currents that group the world like arteries.

The wave covers every thing it collects, burying the world's thoughts in a silence too great for people to break.

We tell ourselves we understand it. We graph their habits, build walls and harbors to struggle it, title the hours when it will rise and fall. But the tide doesn't care about our measurements. It never belonged to us. It concentrates only to the moon.

That pale cat in the atmosphere, distant and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every time of every day. The water stretches toward it, climbing to meet its unseen hand. And when the moon turns away, the water falls back. That quiet tug-of-war has formed the world for billions of years. Actually the deepest seas are tethered to anything beyond themselves.

The wave is changing.

It's creeping further inland now. Glaciers are reduction in to their depths, heating seas are swelling its human body, and shorelines are vanishing part by piece. Islands we after believed endless already are gone, reduced to nothing but titles on previous maps.

And here is the reality many people don't need to manage: the wave will not end for us.

We call it disaster. The wave calls it nothing at all. It simply remains, as it always has, taking and providing, sculpting and erasing. It's erased entire continents before. It will do so again.

Would you imagine the future?

The water rolls on the cities we built. Streets disappear underneath the waves, their asphalt damaged and broken like previous bone. Systems fall into the search, turning into reefs wherever fish drift through silent glass halls. Monuments crumble, smashed and dispersed until they are indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Entire civilizations are paid off to fragments, carried away by currents so solid we could never swim against them.

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

It will simply remember.

Because that's what the wave does. It is the planet's memory. Every life, every storm, every reduction is flattened into its depths and carried forward. The hold has observed entire worlds increase and fall. It understands things number human language could ever hold.

But the hold is not really a thief. It is just a sculptor.

It produces life to the shore. It provides vitamins to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It designs the edges of the planet earth, smoothing sharp rocks in to delicate stones, remaking shores with every breath. With no wave, the planet's pulse could falter. Oceans might stagnate. Coastlines might wither.

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

We head to the water's edge without generally understanding why. Kiddies chase the retreating dunes, laughing, then shriek when it rushes right back toward them. Adults sit at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the beat, letting the noise of these lives slide away. There's something timeless in the tide's air — a thing that calls to the portion people that recalls where we came from.

Since we originated from the water once.

The hold moved living onto the land. It cradled the very first delicate animals that dared to examine from the shallows. And perhaps that's why we sense so little ranking before it now — perhaps not since it can take sets from people, but because in some heavy, unspoken way, we all know it gave us every thing first.

Stay there long enough, and you'll start to notice the details. The calm whip at your legs since it draws away. The hiss of pockets crumbling in the foam. The faint, nearly human sigh as it exhales onto the sand.

If you hear tightly, you might hear the wave telling you a truth:

“Nothing you understand is permanent.
But nothing is truly lost, either.”

One day, the hold will move around the entire world as if we were never here. The titles of our cities, the boundaries we struggled conflicts to protect, the monuments we built to outlast time — all of it will soon be swept away, softened, and moved into the deep.

And yet… there's a strange ease in that.

Because the tide reminds people that individuals are section of anything larger than ourselves. A thing that does not require us, but holds people the same. Every thing we do, everything we build, every air we get becomes part of its memory. The wave maintains it, also whenever we are gone.

You'll never know all so it carries. Nothing folks will.

But next time you're at the seaside, stop. Feel the take at your feet. Watch the waves draw lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Remember that the exact same hold touched lives you may never match and can feel lives Planet after yours.

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

The tides won't ever reveal their secrets.
But when you are calm enough, you could feel them in your bones.