Seashells: Artifacts of the Ocean

I recently took a vacation to the beach on the Australian Gold Coast. I love the smell of the ocean breeze and the way the sun beats down on me as the motion of the waves calms my every worry in the world. I could literally spend years on the beach and never regret a moment of it.

One of my favourite beach activities is searching for seashells. There are millions of seashells in the ocean that come from a wide variety of creatures. They all look different and each has their own personalities that come across in the divots and impressions in the shells.

As I was looking for my seashells, I had a thought. The ocean is a vast body of secrets that has a story underneath that no one really knows about. So, in essence, each sea shell tells a different, but small, portion of the ocean’s story. They are true artifacts of the ocean that show what the ocean has been, is now and will be in the future.

Pretty deep if you think about it. Just like each person has a different story and a different set of artifacts that they take with them from day to day, so do the seashells at the beach. Each has experienced its own part of the story of the vast ocean and has lived to tell about it. Making it on to the beach is its way of trying to get the story out to the world.

I kept thinking about this as I made my way down the beach with my collection of beautiful shells. Each had a different shape, colour and texture and each was beautiful in its own way.

We have our own stories so in essence, we are like the seashells in the ocean of life. We each carry our own personal artifacts with us that are a representation of what we have experienced in our lives and we really cannot share our true experiences with anyone other than ourselves. Other people will see the artifacts on our skin and the laugh lines on our face, but they will never truly know our story, just like we will never know the story of the ocean or the seashells.

The point was not to be too philosophical, but to realise that people are all unique and we are special in all of our own ways. People do not take the time to realise that anymore and when they don’t realise it, they lose a bit of their identity each time they forget about it.

So, remember you are an artifact of the world and you tell your own unique story in the world, just like seashells tell the story of the ocean, piece by piece. People don’t feel like they are important enough and thinking about this idealistic notion will make you feel better about your place in the world and realise that we are all important in our own way.