When you carve your name into the sand at the sea, the sand that's soft and squishy, the kind that is easy to  change and pull, you are carving your name into the very earth on which you stand and breathe. But the waves will come, the waves are inevitable. The waves will wash away your name. No one can stop the waves. We try. We fight the waves until we can not feel the bottom of the ocean any longer. And when we lose that touch, when we lose the tendril of a toe that keeps us there, keeps us where the waves have no effect, then they sweep us back to the sand, back to the land, back to where our names once were and have now washed away. The waves take us back to the place where we must carve our names into the soft, temporary sand once more.

But if we take our finger, and if we choose sand farther from the sea, the drier, firmer stuff, our name may last longer. The waves will try, nay, they will desire to slowly erode the trenches of the k and then the a and then the t and then the i and then the e. The waves must wait though; you've chosen stronger ground. They can not reach you yet. But the tides change and the waves stretch their greedy fingers. Fingers that will fill every crevice, every line of our person, and rub it out trying to make it less personal, less original. Less a part of us and more a part of the rest of the flat, dispassionate sand.

But if we simply stand on the shore, and keep our eyes straight ahead of us, we will never see the sand at our feet, only the world before us. If we attack that world, if we charge into that broiling churning mass of foam and the unknown, we might forget to write our name in the sand. We may reach the end of the ocean without ever telling another what we accomplished and where we have gone. Do not despair, for there is Someone else who will write our names for us, in much greater stuff than sand.