The Ocean Remembers Everything

Image this.

 

You are ranking barefoot at the side of the ocean. The air is heavy with sodium, the air painted in bruised purples and firelight from the dying sun. The dunes competition forward, styling and breaking at the feet, before sliding calmly back in the depths.

 

But this is not only water touching you.

 

Since every tide… holds memory.

 

The exact same wave that brushes against your legs tonight once swept around sides you may never know. It buried neglected cities, cooled lava because it poured from newborn volcanoes, and drowned woods that endured before individuals ever imagined walking upright. It moved the ashes of shoots that burnt out one thousand years ago. It has held the bones of sailors who faded into the night time, their comments swallowed by wind and water.

 

And now it variations you.

 

The hold requires bits of the planet with it every time it retreats — cereals of sand from hills that dropped long ago, covers that once sheltered lives smaller when compared to a fingernail, fragments of rock and glass worn clean from ages of tumbling. Wherever do they're going? To the places we can not see. In to trenches greater than Everest is tall, into black canyons wherever gentle hasn't handled, in to currents that range the globe like arteries.

 

The wave hides every thing it collects, burying the world's thoughts in a silence also huge for all of us to break.

 

We inform ourselves we understand it. We chart their habits, construct surfaces and harbors to struggle it, title the hours when it'll rise and fall. However the wave does not care about our measurements. It never belonged to us. It concentrates simply to the moon.

 

That soft ghost in the air, distant and untouchable, pulls at the oceans every moment of each day. The water Planet toward it, growing to meet their invisible hand. And once the moon converts away, the water falls back. That quiet tug-of-war has designed the world for billions of years. Even the deepest seas are connected to something beyond themselves.

 

The tide is changing.

 

It is creeping farther inland now. Glaciers are reduction in to their depths, heating waters are swelling its human anatomy, and shorelines are vanishing part by piece. Islands we when thought endless already are removed, paid off to just names on previous maps.

 

And here's the facts many people don't need to manage: the wave won't stop for us.

 

We call it disaster. The hold calls it nothing at all. It really remains, since it always has, taking and offering, building and erasing. It's cleared entire continents before. It can do so again.

 

Could you imagine the long run?

 

The sea rolls within the cities we built. Highways disappear underneath the waves, their asphalt broken and damaged like old bone. Systems fall into the surf, turning in to reefs wherever fish move through quiet glass halls. Monuments fall, broken and scattered until they're indistinguishable from the stones of the seabed. Entire civilizations are paid off to pieces, carried away by currents therefore strong we're able to never move against them.

 

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

 

It will just remember.

 

Since that is what the hold does. It's the planet's memory. Every living, every storm, every reduction is flattened in to their depths and moved forward. The wave has seen entire sides increase and fall. It understands points no individual language can actually hold.

 

Nevertheless the wave is not really a thief. It is really a sculptor.

 

It offers living to the shore. It provides nutrients to estuaries and marshlands wherever new animals are born. It designs the ends of the earth, smoothing sharp stones in to delicate stones, remaking shores with every breath. Without the tide, the planet's heartbeat would falter. Oceans would stagnate. Coastlines could wither.

 

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

 

We head to the water's side without always knowing why. Kiddies chase the retreating dunes, laughing, then shriek when it rushes straight back toward them. Adults sit at the shoreline all day, hypnotized by the rhythm, making the sound of their lives slide away. There's anything timeless in the tide's air — a thing that calls to the part folks that remembers wherever we got from.

 

Because we came from the water once.

 

The wave carried living onto the land. It cradled the first sensitive animals that dared to crawl from the shallows. And perhaps that's why we feel so little standing before it today — not because it can take sets from people, but because in certain heavy, unspoken way, we all know it gave people every thing first.

 

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

 

If you hear strongly, you might hear the tide suggesting a reality:

 

“Nothing you understand is permanent.

But nothing is actually missing, either.”

 

One day, the hold may move over the entire world as though we were never here. The names of our cities, the borders we struggled wars to protect, the monuments we created to outlive time — all of it will be swept away, softened, and carried to the deep.

 

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

 

Since the tide reminds us that individuals are part of something larger than ourselves. Something that doesn't need us, but supports people the same. Every thing we do, everything we construct, every breath we get becomes element of its memory. The wave maintains it, even when we are gone.

 

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

 

But the next occasion you're at the beach, stop. Have the move at your feet. Watch the waves bring lines in the mud, then remove them without hesitation. Understand that exactly the same hold moved lives you may never meet and can touch lives extended following yours.

 

It does not subject if you forget.

The wave won't.

 

The tides won't inform us their secrets.

But if you're calm enough, you could sense them in your bones.