Sea Change

Consider this when next you stand at the shore's edge gazing out to sea, marvelling in the constancy of its ebb and flow. It was never always thus and will always be changing as time inches forward and Earth's geological clock ticks on. When the Moon was much closer to the Earth after it broke away from its mother ship, its gravitational pull was much greater than now, and each incoming tide would seem to us now as violent as a tsunami. As the moon gradually moves further from our planet, it is likewise prompted on its journey by the ocean tides on our planet that it - principally - initiated in the first place; each swell of our oceans a gentle push outwards and onto our moon, gently, subtly, nudging it further out into space, its progress more remotely aided by the weaker gravitational pull of more distant solar, planetary and stellar bodies: its progress outward and away from its original home and us, imperceivibly but measurably slow and insistent.

Over vast time, the tides will weaken, due to the waning influence of our moon, and the oceans will calm and their flora and fauna will alter and evolve to adapt to their new environment; our weather patterns following suit due to this changing of the ocean's currents. Geologic time passes and the Earth's rotation itself slows constantly with it, with days lengthening due to the frictional drag of its vast waters acting as an inertial brake on its motions, as it has acted since the dawn of time, when a day would have been measured more in minutes than hours had we been around to quantify it. Everything slows, microscopically; everything changes, imperceptibly: our time on this planet too short, even as a species, let alone as individuals, to note consciously the niceties of our planet's evolution across time itself. What we imagine constant and unchanging, immutable; is ultimately as fleeting and evanescent as our own existence itself...