You sometimes hear the term ‘sands of time’, an English idiom relating the passage of time to the sand in an hourglass and that time is a finite commodity which is gradually running out.
The phase ‘Footprints on the sands of time’ was used in a poem called A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time
On a calm day, your footprints in the sand might last a while but on a stormy day, the next wave erases all evidence of your passage on the beach.
Sands of Time
