At T-minus-three days and counting until our first child is due, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the swimming pool lately. And considering how everyone—old people, toddlers, college students, and even bored-looking lifeguards—seems to love a bulging, pregnant belly, the art of making friends on the pool’s edge has been easy. Warm smiles and friendly banter greet me as I descend into the bliss of weightlessness at lunchtime every day, and in just a few short months, I’ve been able to learn a little bit about a lot of people’s families, jobs, passions, and daily routines.

The diversity of the lunchtime swim crowd is amazing, as people of all shapes and sizes wearing brightly colored suits and caps convene to prepare for triathlons, shed a few pounds, rehab a bum hip, relieve the stress of the workday, or simply to fulfill an element of their social calendars. In the pool, with white hair masked by swim caps and aching joints floating alongside sinewy muscles, age somehow seems to lose relevance. As I swim steady strokes in my lane, I love the mental image of my unborn son in the same pool as an art history major, a competitive triathlete, a retired professor, and a great, great grandmother of six.

As our society approaches an imminent and dramatic demographic shift, I think often about what sort of country my son will grow up in. What sort of social problems will he set out to solve, and who will he look up to? How will he view his parents and his grandparents and his neighbors? For the optimist in me, many of these answers are found in the waves of the swimming pool. Handling this shift is about being able to co-exist with and learn from people representing a broad range of ages and backgrounds. It’s about not caring what color the hair is underneath the cap or what stroke the person in the next lane is doing. It’s about finding our collective strength. Oh, and a few endorphins don’t hurt either.