takeshi21

These days I wake up at 5:30 in the morning to swim at the Pasadena Rose Bowl facility for an hour and a half. No doubt its a struggle each day to convince myself that the exercise is worth the trouble when I could otherwise be comfortably asleep. The task is made no easier by the fact that the sky is still dark from the waning night. Not even my dog stirs this early in the morning.

By the time I entered the somewhat chilly water, the sky had begun to brighten, painting the horizon in rosy hues from where the Sun would soon rise. A thin layer of mist hovers just above the surface of the pool. I dive in feet first then begin to move quickly, trying to raise my body temperature with vigorous kicks and strokes before I start to shiver. Within a hundred meters Im moving comfortably through the water, clearing my mind of all thoughts, worries, and concerns.

I turned at the wall to begin another lap then flipped over to begin a set of backstrokes. As the water cleared from the view of my goggles, I smiled to see the face of the Moon, smiling back in profile, equally pleased as I was of it to have met this early morning. Through my increasingly labored breathing, I marveled at the encounter. I was pulling smooth, clean strokes through still water, observing a large piece of space rock that rotated in perpetual orbit around a larger piece of inhabited space rock we call Earth. A courageous astronaut named Neil Armstrong once walked across the surface of this heavenly body, spinning about 238,857 miles away from me.

I flipped and turned to swim back in the opposite direction of the pool.

The Moon continued smiling at me, its face now a little less bright compared to the radiance of the rising Sun. All around me, people in their homes were beginning to stir, rising from their beds and wiping the sleep from their eyes. I was in awe to realize that within the next twelve hours, every being on this planet would have the same opportunity to observe the same smiling Moon, gazing upon us in more or less the same pose. As I kept swimming, I couldnt help but hear, over and over, the beautiful words of a different Mister Armstrong, one named Louis:

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"

I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world

Oh, yeah.