The water is billions of years old. What sights the seas have seen; the fall of dinosaurs, the fall of man as Adam and Eve are banished from the garden. Is it not the same water that recycles itself perfectly to fall anew upon the ground and into our rivers to quench our thirst and grow our crops once again? Remarkable really. A perfectly useful existence. And what a lifespan it has. It’s not the same sea of course, they are ever changing. It is not the same ocean. No one can say they know the ocean for the ocean is always metamorphisising into other shapes and other things, living other lives, increasing its boundaries, or even decreasing them in some places.
You’ve never been on the same bit of water twice. You may think you have, or think you know that the Esk goes this way and the Spey goes that way. But even the stones underneath are changing, moving, the water eats and corrodes the river banks with an everlasting push of constantly renewed force. You do not know this. We give them names but they are meaningless and the words themselves become like the water, not the other way around. ‘It’s Baltic in here’ is an example. It does not know it’s synonymous with cold.