The Patience of the Waves

The Patience of the Waves

When you live by the sea, you learn to listen to its slower language. Not the constant murmur that accompanies morning coffee or quiet afternoons, but that deeper tongue that speaks in long pauses—in silences that seem empty but are actually full of meaning.

This morning, at dawn, the tide was low, and the horizon seemed farther away than usual. The water, pulled back several meters, revealed stones, shells, and crab tracks that vanish under the foam during the day. It was as if the sea allowed us to peek into its notebook, into those pages it writes on the sand and later erases with the same calm with which it created them.

In these days when everything seems to rush—the news, the highways, even our conversations—the sea reminds us that not everything needs to be resolved right away. There are invisible processes that take time: the current polishing a pebble, coral growing millimeter by millimeter, the cloud slowly forming over the Pacific before becoming rain.

The patience of the waves is not resignation. It is certainty. It is knowing they will reach the shore again and again, even if they take their time, even if the wind changes, even if the world seems to speed up. Perhaps that is the greatest gift it offers us: teaching us to live without the urgency of arriving, but with the calm of moving forward.

By late morning, the tide began to rise. The stones and the tracks were slowly covered. The notebook closed again. But it didn’t matter: I know tomorrow there will be new pages, new signs in the sand, and the sea will continue writing its story—without hurry, and without end.

— Sebastián del Mar