A Moment In Time.

Reading this may result in a desultory shrug.

It takes 498 seconds or 8 minutes and 18 seconds for a ray of sunlight to travel the vast distance of 150 million kilometers to reach the blacks of your hair. A fact many of us have come to regard as auxiliary information. But there is a beauty to this number. It creates a daily paradox, scientific jargon and explanation aside.

Imagine you are standing on a beach, with your eyes closed. You hear the ebbing flows of the tide, the continuous caws of the seagull as well as the billowing wind. Then as you slowly open your eyes, darkness surrounds you. But only for an ephemeral instant. For in the next, the sky lights up brightly, as if someone just switched on the lights. Where is the paradox we ask?

To answer that we would have to pause and rewind. 8 minutes and 18 seconds back to be precise. At this moment the Sun has already begun to shine on this side of the Earth [ the part experiencing dawn ], yet we are still engulfed in darkness. In these 498 seconds we live with the eerie prescient knowledge that light will encompass us soon.

How is that not beautiful?

PS : the same happens with sunset, just in a reversed format.