We are but Grains of Sand
We are but Grains of Sand
By Susanne Liebich
September 2025
I was walking through grains of sand early this morning on the Dune Hike from Snail Road in Provincetown to the National Seashore beaches that border the Atlantic Ocean. As I walked this familiar route, I noticed the dunes had shifted in the last year – the deep valley that was surrounded by the highest dunes, where my children had rolled from top to bottom like spinning tootsie rolls had diminished. New dunes had started to emerge around the old dunes. The barely-there trails to the ocean had shifted and recircuited. There were some small ponds that were not there before. As I was hiking in bare feet and the sand created impressions of my feet, I thought of the ephemeral nature of this landscape. Geologists estimate that Cape Cod is approximately 15-20,000 years old. That’s it! A nanosecond compared to the age of the earth.
In 1991, after a hurricane, the magnificent, yet fragile sand ecosystem of the National Seashore breached all the way from the Atlantic Ocean at Ballston Beach in Truro to the Pamet River and Route 6 which temporarily created an island and connected the ocean to the bay. Further down the National Seashore in Wellfleet, the lovely WW2 era cottages overlooking the National Seashore are falling into the ocean. One of the first cottages in which we stayed had to be moved back up the fragile hill. There is a remnant of an old cottage well sticking out of the side of the sand wall.
Nowhere are we more reminded of the transiency of the landscape than in the area of Provincetown called Long Point, which is the very tip of Cape Cod. In the mid-1800’s, when the Long Point settlement declined due to the decreasing profitability of salt works and fishing, and homes were also more susceptible to the severe Atlantic storms, several houses were floated over in the mid-1800’s to the west end where they exist today on Commercial Street.
As we hiked through the dunes this morning, my stream of consciousness led me into thinking about the transient nature of life. I thought about my ancestors and how I really do not know much about my great grandparents or earlier generations and that like the dunes of the seashore have come and gone. With the advent of digital technology, so much more about our lives are recorded. Are my great grandchildren (if I am lucky enough to have them), or later descendants ever going to have more than a passing thought about me and the life I lived? The world will be a quite different place then, and people will have adapted to the new ways and technologies of the future. Will the old stories be important?
I remember saying to a friend that our future generations will not really know too much about us. He said, “that’s so depressing!” But to me, I do not find it depressing at all. I look at my life as a finite time where I am attempting to make the most of the time I have left. The awareness of this limitation puts me in a more present state of mind, ready to enjoy and appreciate all the blessings that life has offered me. Perhaps this is also a lesson to my descendants that I love them, I have hope for them and the future, and that they should live their lives with joy.
One of my favorite Substack newsletter authors Robert Hubbell always ends his highly informative newsletter with a “Daily Dose of Perspective”. Robert is an amateur astronomer who enjoys photographing and describing various constellations such as: “Brocchi’s Cluster is a visual collection of stars that range from 235 light years to 1735 light years from the Earth.” A light year is six trillion miles. Somehow, the idea that the earth is but a grain of sand in our vast universe is a balm for the soul in these uncertain times we are currently experiencing. And our legacies which are recycled as the air, the trees, the water, and the earth remind us that ultimately, regardless of our stories, we are all connected.