Waves Return to the Ocean

On living life and letting go

Imagine an ocean, In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.

source

And then it crashes into the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.

But the truth is, I can’t help but wonder if the wave mourns itself. Does it know, even in the height of its existence, that it’s already fading, that it was never meant to be more than a moment? There’s something in that—something I can’t shake—the way life forms itself into shapes we recognize, only to collapse back into formlessness. We are all waves, crashing and receding, nothing more than borrowed moments in a body far older and vaster than ourselves.

And maybe that’s what memento mori is—the gentle reminder, not that we will die, but that we are already dissolving. Each breath, each heartbeat, is the ocean drawing us back in, slowly, steadily, with a quiet inevitability. We cling to the idea of permanence, of being something distinct, something more than just an arrangement of water and flesh, but in the end, we are always returning. The self we hold onto so tightly is just a crest in a larger, endless tide.

But the wave... It fights. In those brief seconds before it crashes, it stretches itself thin against the wind, against the pull of gravity, as if trying to defy the ocean itself. That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? This constant struggle against the pull of entropy, the desperation to matter, to hold form just a little longer, to be seen, to leave a mark. But no matter how hard we try to defy it, the water will always reclaim us.

Maybe that’s the tragedy of it all—knowing that no matter how high we rise, we are always destined to fall, to disappear. And yet, we rise anyway. We build, we create, we love, all the while knowing it’s slipping away. We have this impulsive urge to be remembered, a need to carve our names into the sand, even as we watch the waves lick them clean. Maybe it’s hope, or maybe it’s just the way we fight the inevitable, pretending for a little while that we’re not just returning to the vastness from which we came.

But still, there’s beauty in it, isn’t there? In the way the wave curls before it falls, in the brief, fragile dance of something that knows it won’t last. We are the wave, and in our transience, there is meaning. The ocean doesn’t mourn the wave; it simply continues, timeless and unfeeling. But we mourn. We ache for the loss of ourselves, even as we know, deep down, that we are always a part of something greater, something infinite.