The Blink of an Eye: Savasana, Oblivion, and the Alien Rock That Ghosted Us All

29 Jun

Tonight I entered my yoga studio like I do most Thursday nights — barefoot, half-hydrated, and pretending I didn’t just wolf down two street tacos before walking out the door. It’s a candlelight class, which is exactly what it sounds like: a dark, 96°F studio illuminated only by a low matrix of LED candles flickering across the floor like some occult worship ceremony for the god Vuori.

Set up in the front corner, I stretched out in savasana and stared up at the ceiling fan blades turning like time itself. I hadn’t even begun moving, but I could already see the future: an hour from now, I’d be lying in this very same pose, this time drenched in sweat, my limbs ringing like struck bells, my mind scrubbed clear by the holy trinity of breath, motion, and surrender. Time would collapse into a hiccup. One moment I’d be standing in warrior two, squinting at my silhouette in the mirror, and the next I’d be back on the mat, wondering where the hour went.

And that’s when the mental trapdoor opened.

I thought about the universe. About how it’s 14 billion years old, give or take a few cosmic burps, and how our whole existence — humanity’s entire manic run of art, violence, love, cities, empires, dreams, and dog memes — is just the blink of an eye. No, not even a blink. A twitch of a neuron that didn’t even fire. My life? A one-millionth of that blink. A half-finished sigh in the lungs of the cosmos.

And as I lay there, the usual inner static — bills, deadlines, unanswered texts, the lingering aftertaste of chipotle — all of it evaporated. Because nothing is permanent. Not the wins. Not the losses. Not the knees that now creak during crescent lunge. Not even the person thinking these thoughts. We’re all just temporary ripples in an ocean that does not care.

As velvety new-age music poured through the studio speakers like a Xanax waterfall, I heard other students quietly unfurling their mats around me. Their own tiny lifespans brushing against mine, sharing this absurd and beautiful hour in a sweatbox full of soft, flickering lights and impermanence.

And then — for absolutely no reason I can explain — I thought of ʻOumuamua.

ʻOumuamua. The cosmic hit-and-run. The alien middle finger hurled through our solar system in late 2017, too fast and too weird to explain.

It was the first object ever detected that came from outside our solar system. Not from the asteroid belt, not from the Oort Cloud, not from any sleepy little orbital path — but from the deep, black, star-scattered beyond.

It arrived silently, a cigar-shaped enigma hurtling through space at 196,000 miles per hour, tumbling end over end like a javelin thrown by a drunk god. We caught it only after it had already passed the Sun. By the time astronomers realised what it was, it was halfway to the exit, flipping us the celestial bird on its way out.

And here’s the kicker: it sped up as it left. Not dramatically, but just enough to defy explanation. No visible tail. No gas jets. No cometary shedding. Just a silent acceleration, as if powered by a hidden engine or pushed by the breath of some unknown physics.

We tried to study it. We aimed our telescopes. We ran the math. We speculated — wildly. Some scientists said it was just a weird rock. Others said it was possibly a shard of cosmic ice. One Harvard astrophysicist suggested it might be a solar sail — a deliberate construct from an alien civilization. One easily pictures everyone else at the faculty lunch table promptly choking on their chicken salad at this declaration. But you can’t rule it out.

And the truth? We’ll never know.

We couldn’t photograph it up close. Couldn’t send a probe. Couldn’t catch up. We were too slow, too distracted, too late. ʻOumuamua came, it saw… and it ghosted us. The universe lobbed us a message in a bottle and we were too busy counting inventory to open it.

So what does it all mean?

Maybe nothing.

Or maybe ʻOumuamua is a reminder — just like yoga, just like time, just like savasana — that we don't get to hold onto anything. We can try. We can grip and grasp and point our fancy telescopes at the mystery, but the mystery doesn’t wait.

We’re all ʻOumuamua — visitors from somewhere else, tumbling blindly through this life, accelerating toward something we’ll never understand. And we all, eventually, disappear into the dark.

So lie still. Breathe. Stare at the ceiling fan. And know that even if your knees hurt and your mind won’t quiet down and the person next to you smells like burning Palo Santo — you were here. You blinked. You passed through. And maybe that’s enough.