Every Sandcastle Gets Stomped
A boy’s sandcastle at a noisy water park turned into a quiet metaphor.
There’s a certain chaos soundtrack at a water park — babies shrieking through sunscreen in their eyes, teenagers cannonballing into pools like it’s an Olympic sport, parents shouting “walk!” to kids who have zero intention of walking. You can smell chlorine and fried food in the same inhale.
And somehow, in the middle of all that, there was this boy. Maybe twelve. Face down close to the sand, moving with the kind of concentration usually reserved for surgeons or Lego masters. He wasn’t building a regular bucket-and-moat sandcastle. No — this was sprawling. Spirals. Winding paths. Walls carefully curved. At the center, a pool that caught the light.
I sat there on a lounge chair, half-distracted by my own daughter asking if she could go down the slide just one more time, half-fascinated by this boy’s single-minded devotion. It felt almost holy — this act of creating something beautiful in a place designed for noise and chaos.
And then came the stompers.
Of course they did. A toddler running at full speed, stopped only by a mom’s desperate arm-grab. An older kid who managed to get a foot in, flattening one carefully sculpted wall, before being scolded away. I found myself tense, watching, like it mattered more than it should. Isn’t that adulthood in a nutshell? Watching kids build something delicate while knowing full well how temporary it is.
But the boy didn’t flinch. He just smoothed out the damage, rebuilt the wall, carried on.
When he finally finished, he sat back. Just…watched. And within minutes, a swarm of kids trampled over every curve, every line. Hours of devotion, erased in less time than it takes to eat a funnel cake.
And that’s when something remarkable happened.
Another boy, younger this time, crouched down and began to rebuild. His small hands pressed the sand back into form. Then another joined him. And another. They weren’t as precise as the first builder, but they were trying. They cared enough to put their hands in the sand. And the original boy? He just sat there, still and silent, watching it unfold.
And maybe that’s the quiet lesson I carried home from a loud water park: you can’t stop the stompers, but you also can’t predict who will show up to rebuild.
The boy probably left that day with wet swim trunks and a stomach full of nachos, never realizing he’d handed a stranger in a lounge chair a metaphor for life. He’ll forget the sandcastle, but I won’t.
Because I see my own life in that circle of trampled walls. The times I’ve built something — careers, relationships, dreams — that felt so fragile, only to watch parts of it get knocked down before I was ready. I see myself in the way he sat back, quiet, learning that sometimes letting go is its own kind of strength. And I see hope in those smaller hands, the ones that rushed forward to repair what wasn’t theirs, reminding me that not everything ends just because I’m tired of holding it up.
We’re all builders, stompers, and rebuilders at different points in our lives. Maybe the point isn’t to figure out how to protect the castle, but to notice who shows up when it falls — and to be willing, when it’s our turn, to bend down in the sand and help someone else start again.
Image Generated by OpenAI’s DALL·E, 2025.
