I do some of my deepest thinking in the pool. My mind doesn’t have a lot to do other than count laps so i guess it’s no surprise that the introspection bubbles up. Deep thinking…bubbles… in the pool. Yeah, just roll with it.
I had stopped at the side of the pool to catch my breath for a moment and glanced at my watch just in time to see the seconds tick over into the next minute. Well, it’s a digital watch so there’s no actual “tick”, but you get what I mean.
It occurred to me as that second passed, it was gone forever. We’ll never see that moment again in time. It is utterly and irretrievably lost.
And one second in the future is just as far out of reach. Bursting with potential, but unknowable. We can no more skip ahead to future than we can reach back to the past.
But that one second in the middle? Everything, the entire universe, shares that same instant of time. Every person, every tree, every planet, every atom in all of existence is synced up in that moment.
And then, having caught my breath, I went back to my laps.