Why we all stopped and stared? It wasn't just the whale.

Every five minutes or so, it surfaces.

A grey whale has been swimming around English Bay this past week — just three blocks from my front door — and every time I walk down to the beach, I find the same thing: a cluster of people standing at the water's edge, cameras raised, waiting. When the whale breaks the surface and sends up its spout, you can hear the collective intake of breath. People who arrived as strangers are suddenly shoulder to shoulder, pointing at the same patch of water.

Nobody is checking their phone.

Grey whales are not rare in the Pacific — roughly 20,000 of them migrate past the BC coast every spring, travelling from their breeding grounds in Baja California, Mexico, all the way up to feeding waters in Alaska. The round trip covers somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 kilometres, making it one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal on earth. This one has paused here, in the shallow waters of English Bay, likely feeding on the ghost shrimp buried in the mud beneath the bay. It surfaces, spouts, and disappears again. And every time it does, the people on shore try to capture it.

I've been watching the watchers as much as the whale.

There's something worth paying attention to in that impulse — the cameras, the waiting, the held breath. We live in a city. We are busy people with places to be. And yet here we are, twenty or thirty of us at a time, standing at the edge of the Pacific, completely reorganized around this one creature that likely has no idea we exist.

Why does a whale do that to us?

I think it has something to do with scale, and something to do with time. A grey whale can live 70 years. It will travel millions of kilometres in its lifetime, moving between breeding and feeding grounds with a kind of purposefulness that makes our daily routines look a little provisional. When one surfaces close to shore, in a bay flanked by apartment buildings and coffee shops, the contrast is almost disorienting. Something ancient and enormous is passing through. It will be gone soon. And we know, without being told, that we are lucky to be here at exactly this moment.

What the Cameras Are Really For

That's what the cameras are about, I think. Not just wanting a photo. Wanting proof that this happened. Wanting to hold onto the feeling that comes from being present for something that won't last.

We feel that way about a lot of things, if we're honest. A child at a particular age. An elder who is still here. A friendship in its best season. We reach for our cameras because some part of us already knows the moment is moving through us, not staying.

Is there someone in your life you've been meaning to have a real conversation with — about what matters, about what you want them to know — and you keep waiting for the right moment?

Exploring the reality of our mortality — the heart-centred work we do at Willow™ — isn't about becoming preoccupied with death. It's about developing the capacity to recognize a moment for what it is while it's happening. The whale-watchers on English Bay already know how to do this. They just don't always apply it to the people in their lives, or to themselves.

The whale will move on. That's what whales do. And maybe that's exactly why it's worth standing at the water's edge, waiting for the spout.