In my meditation I notice that a new way of thinking has begun to replace the old. I see the sun rise every morning. A mockingbird buzzes by my head whenever I wander past the tree that holds her nest. Each year the leaves change color and the Fastrack I farmers gather their harvest.
How can a day be a day on each timeline? Does the same mockingbird buzz for my Fast and Slow neighbors, as well?
How can the lines keep multiplying? Will there be a time when it all comes full circle? When the slowest of the Slow meet the fastest of the Fast, and send a chain of practical jokes rolling down the pike, growing in power and bad taste at every pass around the loop?
These are questions the old logic might have asked, and I know they are false. For the river is legend. Its tributaries merge, far downstream from the glacier where once a trickle was all we knew.
How smug we have all become, in our adaptability. We claim to understand, to be at home on the great river!
Yet it widens, and deepens, as it flows.
And eventually, there is the Sea.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Originally, its title was “Coexistence.” It is a little tale, one of my earliest, and the only one I’ve ever written almost precisely as it came to me in a dream.