By Lakshmi | life and reflection—funny side up

It started with a pebble.

Not metaphorically. A literal pebble. Flung with careless glee by a child in our apartment complex who, I must report, has the arm of a professional cricketer and the moral compass of a villain in a 90s Doordarshan serial.

The pebble missed my head (thank relativity), landed in a muddy puddle, and sent a ripple right onto Simba’s paw. Simba—my dog, my son, my tail-wagging therapist—glared at the child with the weary disdain of a middle-aged uncle at a marriage buffet. Nala, meanwhile, panicked, barked at a leaf, and ran in the opposite direction. Classic Nala.

But that ripple. That singular plop in the pond of my Sunday peace. It lingered.

It made me wonder: does anything really happen in isolation? Or is everything—pebbles, puddles, paw-flicks—part of a simultaneous cosmic choreography?

And just like that, I slipped down a rabbit hole made entirely of wave functions, Proustian metaphors, and leftover sambar.

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The Physics of Being Interrupted

You see, in quantum physics, particles aren’t just particles. They’re also waves. That’s right. Everything you’ve ever been ghosted by—including people and job offers—is also technically a wave.

Now add this: two particles can be entangled, meaning they are connected in a way that defies time and space. Change one, and the other changes too—even if it’s on the other side of the universe. Like how my wife can sense I’ve eaten the last piece of cake from three floors away. Quantum mechanics. Married mechanics. Same thing.

So I thought: what if the wave and the particle aren’t just two sides of a scientific coin? What if they’re entangled? Not in time, but in relativity. Not as sequenced events, but as simultaneous truths.

Like a pebble and its ripple.

Like thought and emotion.

Like desire and regret.

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Introducing: Simultaneoty™

I hereby coin a word—simultaneoty (sim-uhl-tuh-nee-oh-tee).

It is the state in which events are not simply sequential, but co-arising. Not cause and effect, but presence and echo. Not “first this happened, then that,” but “this and that happened together, inseparably, like laughter and guilt after a WhatsApp forward you weren’t supposed to enjoy.”

Simultaneoty is when your heart breaks and heals in the same breath.

When you know you should walk away, but your feet stay planted.

When a pebble hits, and the ripple is already history.

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The Human Pond

Let’s take this to our real, messy lives.

You’re standing in your kitchen. You’ve got a spoon in your hand. You’re about to stir your coffee. But you’re also thinking about a friend you no longer speak to. You remember them laughing. You feel it. You taste the coffee. You stir. You ache. You move on.

Simultaneoty.

You’re not remembering and then feeling. You’re not feeling and then moving on. You’re doing all of it, together.

We live in a narrative culture—everything must have a before and after. A why and then a what. But what if we started seeing our experiences not as timelines, but as overlapping ripples?

Not a sequence.

A simultaneoty.

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The Glitch in the Flow

Here’s the twist: this isn’t a problem. It’s a feature.
The human mind isn’t linear. It’s not even a line. It’s a pond full of memory-fish and feeling-frogs and thought-pebbles, all jumping around creating a mess of beautiful, chaotic ripples.

The glitch—the moment the pebble interrupts your morning—isn’t an error. It’s the point.

That splash, that reaction, that sudden jolt into awareness? That’s where the poem begins. That’s where the self briefly steps outside of its spreadsheet and says: wait. I’m here. Still wet. Still alive. Still watching the ripples.

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So What Now?

I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ll scroll past this and forget it by lunch. Or maybe the phrase “motion in simultaneoty” will sit quietly in the back of your head, like a spare lyric or an unresolved melody.

Maybe the next time someone throws a metaphorical pebble at your metaphorical pond, you won’t flinch. You’ll just watch the ripples, and remember that you too are made of wave and particle. You too are many states at once.

You too are a glitch. A beautiful, shimmering, entangled glitch.

And that’s more than enough.

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