The Moment

What if Love Could Be Seen Floating in Sunlight?

A Physics Lesson About Presence, Loss, and the Unrepeatable Nature of Every Moment

What if I told you that the most profound physics lesson I ever learned didn't come from a textbook or laboratory, but from cleaning my father's electric razor in a garage five years after he died?

The Japanese have a phrase—*ichi-go ichi-e*—that captures something we often miss in our rush through life: the idea that each moment is unrepeatable, deserving of our complete presence and reverence. I thought I understood this concept intellectually. Then I discovered it viscerally, floating in a beam of afternoon sunlight.

The Weight of Memory

The shoebox was heavier than I expected when I pulled it from the bedroom closet. "Or maybe you're older than expected," my inner voice observed with its usual helpful commentary. Five years had passed since Dad died, five years since I'd opened this container of his everyday artifacts.

Inside lay the archaeology of a life: a small black comb, a well-worn pocketknife, assorted coins, a neatly folded handkerchief bright as a flag of surrender. And there, looking somehow out of place among these relics, was his electric razor.

Dad was a man of the modern era who preferred what he called his "buzzer" over safety blades and lather. I could picture him perfectly—the careful way he maintained it, always keeping it clean, the countless mornings I'd sit on the edge of the bathroom tub watching him shave while we talked about everything and nothing.

But now, peering into the box, the razor looked wrong. Dull. There was stubble caught in the blades—a violation of everything Dad valued about precision and care.

I decided to clean it. A tribute. A small act of love across time.

The Architecture of Ritual

This razor wasn't some disposable convenience store throwaway. It was engineered to come apart—designed for the kind of meticulous maintenance Dad practiced religiously. I remembered his ritual: one hand popping off the razor top with well-practiced dexterity, holding both pieces while the other hand worked a special little brush through the mechanism. Nearly every time he shaved.

But I am, as my inner voice pointed out, "a man of the convenience age." Instead of Dad's brush, I grabbed a can of compressed air from the desk—one with a long, thin red tube pushed into its nozzle.

The garage felt like the right place for this. More honest somehow than the sterile bathroom where Dad had performed his daily ritual.

When Physics Becomes Poetry

The afternoon sun streamed through small windows, painting the clean floor in golden rectangles. ("Trapezoids," my editor's brain corrected automatically.) I walked into one of those shafts of light to see better.

With one hand, I popped off the razor top just as I'd watched Dad do thousands of times. I held both pieces, positioning the air can close enough that the narrow tube almost touched the exposed blades. Then I pressed the top firmly.

*Pfft.*

What happened next was pure physics, but it felt like witnessing a miracle.

A cloud of hair particles erupted from the razor—incredibly tiny fragments because of the blade's sharpness and Dad's fastidious care. These microscopic pieces of my father were suddenly suspended in the warm, still air, expanding outward into that beam of sunlight.

And then I saw it: sparks of light as individual particles caught the sun—our sun, 93 million miles away—and reflected it for just an instant before winking out. Like stars being born and dying in fast-forward. Like Dad saying hello.

"That's Dad," something childlike in me whispered.

The Last Dance

The cloud began to disperse, starting its gradual drift toward the garage floor where it would scatter and disappear forever. I stood there watching the very last of my father's cells begin their final journey.

"This is the last time I'll be with you, Dad," I thought.

And then something extraordinary happened. Instead of sadness, I smiled. I stepped forward into that sunbeam filled with floating pieces of my father, felt the warm air on my skin, and started to cry—not from grief, but from overwhelming gratitude for this perfect, unrepeatable moment.

Dad would have appreciated this. The precision of it. The beauty of physics making love visible. The way sunlight could transform something as mundane as cleaning a razor into something sacred.

The Science of Unrepeatable Moments

Here's what I learned in that garage: *ichi-go ichi-e* isn't just philosophy—it's physics. Every moment really is unrepeatable because the exact conditions that create it can never be perfectly replicated. The angle of that sunlight, the temperature of the air, the precise distribution of those microscopic particles, my state of mind, the weight of five years of grief and memory—all of it combined to create something that will never exist again.

We think of physics as cold, mechanical, predictable. But that afternoon taught me that physics is actually the study of how the universe creates infinite variations on beauty, how it ensures that no two moments are ever exactly the same.

Those hair particles floating in sunlight weren't just matter obeying the laws of motion—they were proof that love persists in forms we rarely think to look for. That connection transcends presence. That the people we've lost continue to teach us if we know how to pay attention.

The Art of Presence

Now, when I encounter those golden shafts of afternoon light, I remember Dad's lesson about the unrepeatable nature of every moment. Not just the obviously significant ones—births, weddings, last words—but the quiet Tuesday afternoon moments when someone you love is simply there, sharing the same space, the same light, the same physics.

What if we approached every moment like that cloud of particles in sunlight? Knowing it will never exist exactly this way again. Knowing that the particular configuration of light, time, love, and attention that creates this instant is as unique as a snowflake, as precious as a last dance.

Dad taught me that precision and care matter—not just in maintaining a razor, but in maintaining presence. In paying attention to the physics of love. In recognizing that every ordinary moment contains the possibility of the sacred.

*Ichi-go ichi-e.* One time, one meeting. Each moment unrepeatable, deserving of our complete reverence.

Even the ones that make us cry in garage sunbeams, grateful for physics lessons we never knew we needed.

*Fellow Traveler*

*5 min read*