Picture this.

You're standing barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is major with salt, the air colored in bruised purples and firelight from the desperate sun. The dunes race ahead, styling and breaking at the feet, before sliding silently back into the depths.

But that isn't only water touching you.

Since every tide… carries memory.

The same hold that brushes against your legs today after swept over sides you may never know. It buried forgotten cities, cooled lava as it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned woods that existed before humans actually wanted strolling upright. It moved the ashes of fires that burnt out one thousand years ago. It's held the bones of sailors who faded in to the night time, their comments swallowed by breeze and water.

And now it variations you.

The tide requires bits of the entire world with it every time it retreats — grains of sand from mountains that fell sometime ago, covers that once sheltered lives smaller than the usual fingernail, fragments of stone and glass used smooth from generations of tumbling. Where do they go? To the places we can't see. Into trenches deeper than Everest is large, into black canyons where light hasn't handled, in to currents that group the globe like arteries.

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

We inform ourselves we understand it. We information its habits, build walls and harbors to battle it, title the hours when it will increase and fall. Nevertheless the tide does not value our measurements. It hasn't belonged to us. It listens and then the moon.

That light cat in the atmosphere, remote and untouchable, brings at the oceans every moment of each and every day. The water Planet toward it, growing to generally meet its unseen hand. And once the moon turns out, the water falls back. This silent tug-of-war has formed the planet for billions of years. Also the deepest seas are connected to anything beyond themselves.

Yet the hold is changing.

It's creeping further inland now. Glaciers are reduction in to their depths, warming waters are swelling its human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing item by piece. Islands we after believed endless happen to be gone, decreased to nothing but titles on previous maps.

And listed here is the truth many people don't need to handle: the wave won't end for us.

We call it disaster. The hold calls it nothing at all. It simply remains, because it generally has, taking and giving, sketching and erasing. It's deleted entire continents before. It is going to do so again.

Is it possible to envision the future?

The ocean rolls over the cities we built. Streets vanish under the dunes, their asphalt damaged and damaged like old bone. Systems fail to the search, turning into reefs wherever fish drift through silent glass halls. Monuments topple, destroyed and dispersed till they are indistinguishable from the rocks of the seabed. Whole civilizations are decreased to parts, overly enthusiastic by currents therefore strong we will never swim against them.

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

It will just remember.

Since that is what the hold does. It is the planet's memory. Every living, every storm, every reduction is flattened in to their depths and moved forward. The wave has watched whole worlds rise and fall. It knows things number human language can ever hold.

But the wave is not only a thief. It is a sculptor.

It gives living to the shore. It provides vitamins to estuaries and marshlands wherever new creatures are born. It designs the sides of our planet, smoothing sharp stones into smooth rocks, remaking shores with every breath. With no hold, the planet's pulse could falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines might wither.

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

We go to the water's side without always understanding why. Kids pursuit the retreating waves, laughing, then shriek when it rushes straight back toward them. People remain at the shoreline all night, hypnotized by the rhythm, allowing the sound of their lives get away. There's something timeless in the tide's breath — a thing that calls to the part people that recalls wherever we got from.

Since we came from the water once.

The tide carried life onto the land. It cradled the initial fragile creatures that dared to examine from the shallows. And probably this is exactly why we feel so small standing before it today — maybe not because it will take from people, but because in a few strong, unspoken way, we know it offered us everything first.

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

If you hear directly, you may hear the hold letting you know a reality:

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

1 day, the hold may throw over the planet as if we were never here. The titles of our towns, the borders we fought wars to safeguard, the monuments we built to overcome time — everything is likely to be swept out, softened, and moved into the deep.

And yet… there's an odd ease in that.

As the hold reminds people that individuals are part of anything larger than ourselves. A thing that doesn't need us, but holds all of us the same. Everything we do, everything we build, every breath we take becomes part of their memory. The hold keeps it, actually when we are gone.

You'll never know all so it carries. None of us will.

But the next time you're at the beach, stop. Have the move at your feet. Watch the dunes draw lines in the sand, then eliminate them without hesitation. Remember that the exact same hold touched lives you'll never meet and will feel lives extended after yours.

It does not subject if you forget.
The wave won't.

The tides won't reveal their secrets.
But if you are quiet enough, you may feel them in your bones.