You’re Sitting in Everything
The water on your skin is 4 billion years old. You just never noticed.
It’s 4:35 AM. I’m in the whirlpool outside. It’s 2°C outside. My wife is next to me, telling Russian jokes nobody understands. I’m laughing anyway.
And then it hits me.
The water I’m sitting in is ancient.
Not old. Ancient. The amount of water on Earth has been the same for roughly four billion years. Not roughly the same.
The same.
Every molecule recycled. Endlessly. Since before there were continents to put oceans between.
This water has been everything.
It’s been a glacier for ten thousand years. Then one day it melted and became a river. The river became rain. The rain fell on soil that grew grain that fed someone in a century nobody recorded. It’s been blood inside a body that lived and died and was forgotten. It’s been a tear on someone’s face in a village that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been a cloud above an ocean that had no name yet. It’s been ice. Steam. Milk. Sweat. Fog.
And now it’s here. In a whirlpool in Uitikon. At 5:35 on a Tuesday morning in February. Touching my skin.
We say “fresh water” like it’s new. It’s not new. It’s the oldest thing you’ll ever touch. Older than the mountains. Older than language. Older than the idea of old.
Every glass you drink has been drunk before. Every bath you take has been a storm. Every tear you cry has been cried by someone else, somewhere, sometime, in a form you’ll never trace.
Water doesn’t remember. But it carries.
I think that’s why I love water so much. Not for the warmth or the relaxation or the way it loosens your shoulders at the end of a long day.
I love it because when I sit in it, I’m sitting in everything that ever was. Every ocean. Every rain. Every river. Every body. Every cloud. All of it is here, touching me, and I’m part of the cycle now.
The molecule that’s on my arm right now might have been in the Nile when pharaohs were building pyramids. It might have fallen on the Camino the day I walked through rain for twelve hours straight with Nelson. It might have been inside a dinosaur. It might have been in the first raindrop that ever fell on this planet.
There’s no way to know. And it doesn’t matter. Because the point isn’t where it’s been. The point is that it’s been everywhere. And it’s still here. And it’s still moving.
That’s the thing about water. It never stops. But it never loses itself either.
It changes form. Liquid. Gas. Ice. Cloud. Tear. Blood. River. Ocean. It becomes something completely different. Unrecognizable. And then it becomes itself again. Over and over. For four billion years.
It doesn’t hold on. It doesn’t resist the change. It doesn’t grieve what it was before. It just moves into the next form. And the next. And the next.
And somehow, through all of that, it’s always water. The essence doesn’t change. Only the shape.
I think we’re like that.
We change form. We break apart. We evaporate. We freeze. We fall. We dissolve into something bigger than ourselves and forget we were ever a single drop.
And then one day, we condense again. We become a drop. We fall. We land somewhere. We become a river. We flow.
The pilgrim doesn’t stop walking because he’s arrived. He stops because he realizes he was always the water. The Camino was the riverbed. The walking was the flowing. And home was never a place. Home was the willingness to keep changing form without losing what you are.
It’s 5:47 now. The water is still warm. My wife is still next to me. The jokes still don’t translate.
But the water translates everything. It’s the only language that’s been spoken on every continent, in every century, by every body that ever lived.
And right now, it’s speaking to me.
It says: you’ve been everything too. And you’re still here.
🔻 Author’s Note
I write to remember. To walk through silence. To burn through the noise.
I also make music under three personas: Naimor (stillness), Nova Rai (fire), and Charlie C (shadow). And I built a framework called Technomysticism for staying human in the age of AI.
The Burn Blog is where I burn. Technomystic.ai is where I build. Both are the same practice: showing up, feeling what’s real, and not looking away.
🎵 Naimor / Nova Rai / Charlie C.
If you feel it, it’s real.