still waters; endless tides

 

still waters; endless tides

estefaaano_writes

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We often stand at the edge of small waters and mistake them for vastness. The lake lies still before us, mirror-still, reflecting back our own face distorted by ripples ourselves have created. We drink from it, and for a moment, the thirst subsides. The water is sweet, familiar, contained within shores we can see from any point along its perimeter; it feels safe, dependable.

We convince ourselves this is enough. But the ocean calls from beyond the horizon. It calls, not by words, but with a deep, ancient pull rooted in our very bones. It carries the salt memory that predates our first breath. It is the difference between safety and surrender, between the known and the unknowable depths that stretch beyond naming.

The lake offers comfort. It has clear boundaries and depths you can map. You can swim its length and return easily. It holds you gently in its embrace, never asking for more than we're prepared to give. Within its stillness there lies peace. A kind of peace born from knowing exactly where you stand, from living inside limits.

Yet something within us remains restless, an unsatisfied ache. We pace the familiar shoreline and feel a hunger stirring. For we were not made for containment, no matter how beautiful it seems. We were made for the endless conversation between horizon and sky, for the pull of relentless tides that answer to no earthly master, for waters that stretch beyond our capacity to hold them in a single gaze.

The ocean demands everything. It offers no promises of safe return, no guarantee that its depths will yield their secrets or that its moods can be predicted by yesterday's patterns. 

It is immeasurable in depth, vast beyond our comprehension, deeper than our longest diving, wider than our strongest swimming, too wide to cross in a lifetime. To drink from it is to taste eternity. Both strange and infinite.

We tell ourselves we are practical creatures. We point to the lake's reliability, its gentle give and take, the way it holds the sunset like a delicate glass in cupped palms. We build our homes along its edges and call this wisdom. We teach our children to swim in its shallows and believe we have given them mastery over water itself. But when the night falls and the wind now carry whispers from far beyond, the truth seeps in: we have settled for the echo when we were meant for the source.

The lake is love that asks nothing of us. It’s comfortable, predictable, confined within the geography of our understanding. The ocean is love that transforms us utterly, stripping away everything we thought we knew about ourselves and leaves us gasping on strange shores, reborn and terrible and luminous. One can be possessed; the other possesses us completely.

There are those who never leave the lake. They die having known only reflections, mistaking their dull aches for wisdom, and their safety for home. They speak of contentment, of having found their place, but their eyes hold the unquiet sadness of the unexplored. They have confused the manageable for the meaningful.

And there are those who abandon everything for the ocean's call. Following currents unnamed, dive to depths that defy measurement, surrender to tides that carry them beyond all maps. Some are broken by the vastness. Others discover they were made of salt and storm all along, that their lungs were always meant to hold the impossible breath of deep waters.

The tragedy is not in choosing the lake over the ocean, or even in choosing the ocean over the lake. The true tragedy is in believing they are the same thing. Convincing ourselves that any contained water can satisfy a thirst that was born in the infinite. The tragedy lies in settling, in the slow erosion of longing until we forget we were ever meant for more than the circumscribed life.

For the lake will never quench your thirst for the ocean. It cannot. It was never meant to. The lake exists to teach us the shape of water, to prepare our bodies for the deeper truth. The ocean exists to teach us the shape of our own souls. Boundless, mysterious, deeper than we dared imagine, and utterly alive.