By Ryan Louder

Consciousness is a swimming pool. Not something outside us, but something we are immersed in, inseparable from. And within this pool, each of us is both the swimmer and the water.

When you swim, you push water behind you—the past. You also displace water ahead of you—the future. Both are moved by the same stroke, connected through you. The ripples in one direction affect the ripples in the other, reminding us that past and future are never truly separate, only different currents within the same pool.

Treading water is the present. It is not dramatic, not fast, but steady. You hover between what has been and what is yet to come. Slowly, deliberately, you drift forward—suspended in this ongoing moment we call now.

But if you stop altogether, the pool responds differently. You may float, weightless, entering a state of meditation, where movement is no longer necessary and time ceases to matter. Or you may sink, pulled under by the heaviness of your circumstances, drowned by the same stillness that could have set you free. Floating and drowning look similar from the outside, but inside they are worlds apart.

The pool does not judge. It only holds. Whether we thrash, glide, tread, float, or sink, we remain within it. The choice is not whether we are in the pool—we always are—but how we engage with its waters.

Perhaps this is the true nature of consciousness: not a line through time, but a body of water where past, present, and future exist together, disturbed and reshaped by every stroke we take. Each motion sends a pulse behind us, folding into memory, and another ahead, shaping what waits to be. The pool does not divide them neatly—it allows them to mingle, to echo, to collide. A thought is never only of the present; it reverberates backward, softening or sharpening what we remember, while at the same time leaning forward, colouring what has not yet arrived. Every choice is a ripple that cannot be contained, altering not only where we are going but how we understand where we have been. In this sense, time is not a straight road to be walked, but a living current, fluid and responsive, where even the smallest stroke reshapes the whole expanse.