I see a reflection moving on the rim of my bike’s front wheel
It follows the angle my phone’s screen makes with the sun
The photons having been sent out from the sun, an unimaginable distance away
Bounced off the screen, bouncing again on the rim of the tire
And making their way into my eyes
Where they’re captured
Converted to electrical signals
And go into my brain, somehow affecting the patterns that are my consciousness
And making me see them.

I see my nails
Hard, flat pieces of keratin
I can’t see it with the naked eye
But as I watch, they’re slowly being pushed out
From the soft skin at the root of the nail bed
If I wait long enough, I can notice the difference
But I don’t see it happen.

My phone receives a message from someone a hundred kilometers away
The signal travelling wirelessly to a tower somewhere near me, though I cannot see it
Being converted into a signal in a wire
Bouncing from device to device
Making its way, incredibly fast, to the other side of the country
In an imperceptibly short amount of time, it reaches its destination
It’s fast enough to allow a converasation
As if someone were sitting right next to me.

A bird pecks at the ground
Looking for food, most probably
It slowly walks across the road
Doesn’t really seem to follow a path
Driven by instinct, something it’s not aware of
Then, when a car drives towards it
It jumps up, floats for a second
Moves out of the way, on yet another instinct.

The wind rushes at me
Air moving at a speed faster than I can ride my bike
Moved by some interplay of temperature and humidity
And probably many other factors that I don’t know about
Equalizing a difference in air pressure
Or at least moving along that gradient
Trillions of air molecules, bouncing against each other
Experienced together as something big like the wind.

Sometimes my mind wanders into these things
Just fascination with the world around me, I guess
I just sit there, notice these things

And observe.