There’s this scene in White Lotus—Season 3, Episode 6, to be specific. It’s not loud or dramatic. No one’s getting slapped. No one’s confessing to murder. It’s just Tim Ratliff, asking a question he’s probably never said out loud before.
He’s sitting with a Buddhist monk—this quiet, grounded man who speaks like he’s been watching humanity from the shoreline for a long, long time.
“What do you think happens when we die?” Tim asks.
It’s one of those questions people usually save for late-night dorm rooms, or moments of crisis. But Tim asks it with a kind of nervous vulnerability—like he’s hoping for something wise but expecting something vague.
What he gets is something else entirely.
“When you are born, you are like a single drop of water flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down. You die. You land back into the water. Become one with the ocean again.”
No theology. No fear. No sales pitch. Just water.
This answer hit me harder than I expected. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent a good chunk of my life thinking about identity. About how we define ourselves, protect ourselves, build little internal empires out of preferences, social media bios, and Spotify playlists. We work so hard to prove we’re someone. And then here comes this monk, this quiet voice of non-attachment, telling us we were always just a droplet. That the thing we’re most afraid of—dying—is really just returning.
I’ve always been suspicious of metaphors that try to domesticate death. They tend to be cloying or overly certain. But this one—this image of the ocean—doesn’t make promises. It doesn’t say you’ll see your loved ones again or that all your pain will finally make sense. It just says: you won’t be separate anymore. And somehow, that’s more comforting than any dogma I’ve ever heard.
Because the thing about being alive—especially in a culture like ours—is that it can feel incredibly lonely, even when you’re surrounded by people. We’re encouraged to believe we are isolated units. That happiness is something to earn. That suffering is a defect. That connection is conditional and fleeting.
But if we’re drops, just temporarily airborne, then all that pressure… maybe it’s a misunderstanding.
And if the ocean is where we started, and where we’re going, then maybe dying isn’t disappearing. Maybe it’s like remembering the words to a song you loved as a kid. Familiar. Soothing. Complete.
But I kept thinking—what would that actually feel like?
Falling back into the ocean—if we’re really honest about it—probably doesn’t feel like anything at all. Not in the way we usually define feeling. There’s no panic. No regret. You don’t get to do a final Instagram scroll or replay your mistakes in slow motion. What you feel, I imagine, is relief. The relief of not having to try so hard to be someone anymore.
Because for your whole life, you’ve been straining to define yourself—defending your opinions, proving your worth, trying to make sense of your past while attempting to control the future. Even your quiet moments are loud inside. That little ticker tape of thoughts never really stops.
And then… you fall.
Not like falling off a cliff, but more like sinking into a warm bath. The pressure lets go. The edges of things soften. Your name dissolves. Your worries dissolve. The concept of you dissolves. But instead of feeling like an erasure, it feels like reunion. Like merging back into something that was always there, just out of reach—just beneath the noise.
It might feel like water in your lungs, but not the drowning kind. The kind you feel when you’re floating on your back in the ocean and your ears go under, and suddenly the world goes silent except for the thud of your own heartbeat. That kind of quiet. That kind of slow. That kind of vast.
You don’t miss yourself. You don’t miss the people you love—not in the way we miss them here—because everything and everyone is part of you again. Not as separate beings, but as presence. As memory turned into matter. As something wordless and wide.
If there’s any sensation at all, maybe it’s the same feeling you get when you’re about to fall asleep after a long, hard day. You stop thinking. You stop controlling. You let go, and something catches you.
That’s what falling back into the ocean feels like.
It’s not scary. It’s not even sad.
It’s coming home without needing to knock on the door.
