"There is an inevitable hypnosis in watching the waves arrive and depart, and, equally inevitable, there is a confrontation with the fact that this flowing and ebbing goes on with sublime indifference to your every measure of time or meaning. How long has this been going on? And what could ever stop it? Normal notions of past and future simply do not apply at the water's edge, which makes your prevailing obsession with yesterday and tomorrow seem petty, all at once. The present is your only absolute, but the radical transience of the waves makes you see that the present, too, is an act of your imagination. The boundlessness of the ocean is a sacrament of timelessness. "Deep thoughts from a beach lover...