Philosopher on the beach

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, I am terrified.

— Blaise Pascal

She sits at the edge of infinity by the Indian Ocean. Sand fine like baby powder, beige and black where the water pulls back. The ocean hums peacefully under the blazing sun.

Some grow up with snow. Some beside the sea. She had watched the surfers from the shore, stunned at the distance they swam out, so far she could barely spot them, small dark shapes against the Indian Ocean’s moving light. Fearless bodies. Riding the waves of nature the way you ride anything you have studied long enough to trust. Reading it, recognising the pattern before it completes itself, leaning into the shape of it.

She floats on her back, between surface and depth. The trick is the breath. As long as the next breath comes, the belly swells and the water holds. Don’t panic and you’ll be fine. Liquid grass beneath the spine. The ear goes under and the world becomes muffled, interior, the ocean’s acoustics replacing everything that was happening on land. The surrender is the technique.

Beneath her, a world she cannot see. Schrödinger’s ocean floor.

A thought drifts in from the east: we say love is infinite like the sea. Yet the ocean will outlast every promise.

Somewhere above, 100 kilometres up, space begins. Not gradually. Suddenly. One moment: atmosphere. Next: nothing. She imagines Earth from that distance. A pale blue dot. Astronauts call this the Overview Effect.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀                                                   ⠀⠀⠀⠀ .

She floats back.

No matter how far into outer space I send my thinking, the only space I will wholeheartedly occupy is the one right here, in this body I call mine. While I can hold 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in my mind (more than all the grains of sand on every beach and desert on earth) still, none of it touches what it is to be hungry in a moment. To feel a tear dwell in the eye, ready to burst, bright as a jewel floating in endless dark space.

On this pale blue dot live 8.3 billion people who all consider their lives their everything. If life were feeble and disposable, adults, children, the elderly wouldn’t cling so hard to stay in it. We wouldn’t hide death so visibly. Hundreds of cemetery plots should fascinate us rather than send us looking away. The vastness of missing someone, the enormity of heartbreak sitting beside the enormity of stars.

It is one thing to marvel that humans can exist in impossible places, deep water, thin air, distant worlds. It is another to notice we have been existing all this time, effortlessly, without thinking, without failing.

She swims back to shore. Sand underfoot. She gathers her things. One last glance at the ocean. Her footprints in the sand.

Brief.

Already gone.