Your life is a sand castle. It was built and it will collapse at some point. If you like the castle, you can fortify it to keep it up longer, but it’s made to be temporary, so it might be a good idea to build other things, and perhaps even spend some time not building anything whatsoever.
If you spend a substantial amount of time observing, rather than building, or trying to tear down other people’s castles, you can come to the point where you get to see in direct experience how the mind creates this idea of you on a moment by moment basis, and because of this experience, you can see how powerful you really are. Most people suffer because they don’t create themselves, they are at the mercy of what their mind tells them they are, which usually is made up of all sorts of stories from the past that are brought forward, and are then also mirrored to you by interactions with others.
Many people don’t realize that this is happening and they aren’t aware that these stories can be destroyed because they aren’t YOU. Usually, we aren’t too uncomfortable destroying what someone else has created, but when it’s our creation, whether it a thought, an idea, a product, a piece of artwork, it becomes a lot more challenging to destroy because we believe it’s ours.
Structures in the sand can be beautiful, but if one spends all their life consumed by the structures, they might not realize that the structures are the sand.