There’s a moment in baseball, just before the pitch is thrown, that exists entirely in potential. The batter squares up. The infield shifts. The crowd holds its breath. The pitcher winds up—and in that suspended heartbeat, anything could happen. A bunt. A home run. A miss. The pitch could go wild. The batter could flinch. Possibility lives in the space between windup and release.

In quantum mechanics, we call this superposition: the state in which multiple outcomes coexist until one is chosen—until observation collapses the wave function and an event takes form. It’s Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at once. It’s the electron taking every possible path until the measurement decides which one. And in life, it’s that exquisite pause before the next thing happens.

I once knew a man who was a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays back in the 1980s. He was wise, funny, deeply grounded. He worked with troubled youth, but never talked down to them. He saw their potential the way he saw a batter’s stance: as something still in flux, still becoming. He understood that the moment before the pitch contains everything. That even a struggling kid could, at any moment, connect with the ball and send it flying into the future.

Quantum theory—particularly the Orch-OR hypothesis proposed by Penrose and Hameroff—suggests that consciousness itself might operate on this same level. That thought may not be produced by the brain in a mechanical sense, but rather selected from a field of quantum possibilities. That our moments of awareness are the result of orchestrated wave collapses at the quantum scale—tiny flashes of consciousness bubbling up from deeper realms.

If this is true, then death may not be an ending so much as a return to the field. The field of probabilities. The sacred pause. The moment before the next pitch.

In that light, the afterlife may be something less fixed than we imagine. Not a single reality, but a range of potentialities—some bright, some mysterious, all shimmering in the stillness. Perhaps, at the threshold of death, we enter the batter’s box one final time—not to fight for survival, but to witness the pitch we ourselves become.

I think of the man I knew—the scout—and how he stood for potential, how he waited for people to come into themselves without force. And I wonder if the universe does the same. If consciousness, in its deepest form, isn’t a solid thing, but a poised readiness. A presence that holds all outcomes gently until one is chosen. And even then, chooses again.

We’re always stepping up to the plate. Always waiting for the next pitch. Until we’re not.

And maybe that’s when the game truly opens.