Yesterday I was asked by my friend Charles whether I would like to join him in a swim this morning, promptly at 8am, in the English Channel. I was hesitant to say yes, because according to my NYC subjective clock that would be 3am.<\/p>\n
Yet sure enough, this morning promptly at 8am I went down to the beach. And then, here in Brighton, I happily went for a swim in the Channel.<\/p>\n
To my surprise, it had turned out not to be difficult at all to make my appointment. Every fifteen minutes, starting at around 6:30am Brighton time, I had found myself waking up. I kept trying to go back to sleep, but would then find myself promptly reawakening every 15 minutes.<\/p>\n
It would appear that some force deep within my soul really really wanted to wake up and swim in the English Channel. And so I did.<\/p>\n
The water was far warmer than I had expected, but the waves were intimidatingly high. As I walked out from the shore, feeling wave after wave crashing against my body, I started to laugh in sheer glee.<\/p>\n
I recognized that particular laugh: It was my five year old self, laughing aloud with sheer animalistic pleasure. There was something so crazy, so wonderfully beautiful, about walking straight into those crashing waves, that I was overcome with a completely irrational and childlike sense of joy.<\/p>\n
Just before I plunged head first into the breaking waves, I realized that in its way, this experience reminded me of the one time I had gone sky diving. On that occasion, I had had exactly the same thought, which goes something like this:<\/p>\n
Nature, in all of its lovely and infinite magnificence, probably doesn’t care about me at all. But it’s probably not going to kill me either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I was asked by my friend Charles whether I would like to join him in a swim this morning, promptly at 8am, in the English Channel. I was hesitant to say yes, because according to my NYC subjective clock that would be 3am. Yet sure enough, this morning promptly at 8am I went down … Continue reading “Channel surfing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18948"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18949,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948\/revisions\/18949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}