Synchronized Nature

It has been a while since I went to the beach, and the trip to Carita over the weekend was my solace to the years of neglect in coordinating with the waves. And I failed miserably the whole first day. The waves kept leaving my boogie board behind, or I was too fast, or too slow, or completely taken over by them. Hopeless, embarrassing attempts. I did only a little better with the kayak. The waves turned me over as soon as I got on board. Only later I managed to balance myself. And both got better the second day.

Being in nature made me realize, as most would, the harmony of the world. How well the coral fishes camouflaged themselves with sand, hermit crabs with seaweeds. How logical were the colors and the shapes of the corals in relation to the ebbs and flows and where the sunlight reached their crevices. And I was in awe with the most trivial things: how the sunlight reflected off of the waves, how the sand captured the drops of water from my fingertips, the foam and the traces of the waves.

The days were long in the great outdoors. And the whole weekend felt like a whole week away from the city. Strangely, the sun set really fast – although it wasn’t really a sun set I was watching, but two within five minutes.

The first one happened around the time I was leaving. And I thought how strange it was that I could see the sun setting from between the leaves on the trees and a good way above the horizon. Then I realized the sun was going behind a cloud with a horizontal top, which completely hid it behind for a while, before it reappeared again in between clouds. The lower cloud then became the second ‘horizon’ for the sun set.

A dawning thought emerged: what if the earth stopped rotating and turned backwards for a few minutes? Having read most of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, scientifically I remembered vaguely what made the planets so well coordinated. But still, given the state of the global warming and environmental degradation, I couldn’t help asking this question: What if the earth had had enough abuse and decided to call it a quit?

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Below is an image from the pier nearby, where most activities in the nearby fish market has subsided before eight in the morning – when I normally would still be sleeping in Jakarta on weekends.