Sandcastles

A boy built a sand castle on the beach to stand against the sea.  Every wave that ran far enough up the sand to reach it melted its walls and filled in the moat.  The only could keep up by furiously shoveling.  He fought for hours, deadly serious about his play the way a boy can be.  He kept the castle up and even grew it a little.  But when he left, he turned back for one more look.  He saw that the castle was already half melted away and waves coming in all the way to the horizon.

The boy was a man.   A hard-charging man with firms and farms and factories.  A subordinate came to him with a new enterprise proposal.  It would be delicate, complicated, amd maybe quite profitable.  “No,” the man said.  “No sandcastles.  Nothing you have to work at constantly or it will all fall apart.”

The man was old.  “They are all sandcastles,” he said.