What We Build Before the Tide.
A Substack essay for creators.
What will you do with this morning, this month, this life?
What happens if you don’t do anything at all?
We are all asked from an early age “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
A doctor.
A teacher.
A plumber.
A physicist.
An athlete.
The question is rarely about the process of becoming but the final shape. The tower, not the bricks.
Time gives us space.
And within that space, we build.
Not just careers, homes, routines, etc., but a quietly evolving self. One that is continually constructing and deconstructing, sometimes with blueprints, sometimes with guesswork, and always with a clock ticking in the background.
Many live with a sense that they’re not doing enough or not doing the right things.
A man wakes up at 2am wondering if he should take another job.
A woman sits on the living room couch wondering if her best years are behind her.
Imagine a child building a sandcastle.
He knows the tide will come but still builds with wonder. He places a shell at the gate and draws a moat. The waves arrive eventually, as they always do, but the castle was real while it lasted.
And maybe, in some way, it’s more real because it couldn’t last forever.
This is the courage of being human.
To explore even without a map.
To build even without permanence.
We take on projects.
Relationships.
Dreams.
Knowing they might all fall apart, knowing we will, too. But we do it anyway. Not because we’re naive, but because something in us leans toward creation.
Why?
A painter working on a canvas loses her sense of time but finds her sense of meaning.
A father fixing a bike with his child isn’t just repairing spokes — he’s placing a beam in the scaffolding of love and memory.
We often think of legacy as something grand like a name etched in history, a company built, a novel published.
But it may be more subtle.
Maybe our true legacy is how we tended to our minutes. What we noticed. What we tried. What we repaired.
And so we go on.
We start things without guarantees.
We explore even if our curiosity leads to dead ends.
We build even if no one else ever sees the structure.
We love knowing loss will eventually come.
This is all part of our exploration — this hope that something beautiful can come from limited time and imperfect hands.
Ultimately, we may never know if we built the “right” life.
But we can know we built something, and we were awake while we did. And maybe that is enough.
That may be everything.