She sells seashells by the sea shore.
She waves at me.
I wave back.

I wonder why the hand gesture we use to salute another person is called a wave. Perhaps, because people are not too dissimilar to waves. Some gently lap at the shores of your consciousness, leaving little trace of their presence while others lash and smash into you, summer storms, that litter your coast with driftwood and debris.

The beach, that is you, is made up of millions of grains of sand that are the fragments of all the people you have ever interacted with. Every person that has influenced you in some way, even through the sharing of just one idea, has been influenced by others before. Every single occurrence in this world has had an indirect role in creating you; whether it be the chance of two atoms colliding in a time when time was not even fathomable that started the chain reaction that would evolve into the species homosapiens to start your lineage, or that your mother and father happened to cross paths on that day twenty years ago and all the billions of occurrences in between those two dates. The realisation of this fact: the symbiotic nature that every living thing on this planet has in creating and destroying one another, should empower and vitalise us. And yet a lot of us go about our lives depressed, failing to see our self worth and wishing we were not here. We build breakwaters, closing our mind to the oceans beyond, enisling, annihilating ourselves.

Some of us draw S.O.S. signals in the sand and send out distress messages in bottles, hoping someone or something will save us from our isle of isolation, our own constructed prison of a reality, even finding ourselves hoping to be taken hostage aboard a ship by the hands of Fate clad as a pirate.

Religion has a lot to owe to this; by denying us our creative force even though we are all creators, instead, endowing it to a force we call God and by making us live for a better tomorrow through some 'promised' afterlife for fear of a punishment should we not. These premises insinuate that we are helpless to control our lives and paint the bleak picture that there is always something better that can only be achieved through death if we undergo some form of control.

Capitalism, another culprit, trains us to bow down to materialism, and breeds a reliance culture. Some of us 'need' drugs to function properly even five minutes after we awaken on an ordinary day, a good example being coffee or the hours of 'happiness' we buy through the pills that spill from the pens of our therapists as they prescribe our 'required' dosage or the creature comforts we have grown so inseparable from like mobile phones and the whole virtual landscape of the internet. The problem with this reliance culture is that that we start to feel incomplete, a damaged item that needs repair.

But one cannot stay at sea forever, a hostage of Fate. Eventually, we disembark upon some new shore and all will be exciting and refreshing as we explore this strange land but one day as we sit dipping our feet into the crystalline waters, we feel something nudge against our foot, like a thought nagging at the back of our mind. We look down and see a bottle with a rolled up piece of paper inside. Untying the ribbon, the buried thought comes up for air and gasps, as do we, on recognition of our own scrawled handwriting. And in that moment we realise the futility in running away from ourselves.

I bought a sea shell from the girl that sells seashells on the sea shore.
There were thousands of shells on this particular shore yet I still felt the urge to part a gold piece for one from her collection. Even though most would deem it foolish to do so, I felt that this momentary exchange was more valuable than any gold piece could ever be. But before I could comment on the beauty of the sea-shell that seemed to contain the blueprints of the universe within its spirals, she was gone and the only sign of our meeting having taken place were the ripples on the calm surface of the sea as it swallowed the setting sun.

The ripples spread further apart reaching distant shores where a child laughed his first laugh as a wave gently lapped his feet, and even further, causing tsunamis in the continuum of time. All because of me, of the girl who sold seashells on the sea shore, of us, and every single infinitesimally small occurrence that had led to our meeting – but what was the difference between any of them really? A wave of understanding crashed over me and I laughed for the first time.