Gravity’s tendrils have long since tickled my ponderings. I remember the first time my I discovered her, consciously that is, as a force external to myself. I was a boy with a ball, dropping the fuzzy thing first from shoulder height, then while standing on a wooden stool that usually held the phone and it’s spiraling cord, and finally from the highest point a boy of that age could muster, from atop the dinner table itself, that polished emblem of family sanctity well preserved by Mom and her weekly dousings of Pledge. The experiments would repeat across days stretching through years, time such a nebulous concept within the hazy span that wisps backwards like the tails of a cloud. Even then, before such words as velocity and acceleration put names to her magic, explanation futile attempt to replace divinity, I recognized the tiny variables that influenced her force. Time. That seemed the most potent variable of the bunch. And thus, a child pushing his own limits, tiny footprints on polished oak, bare feet stretching their tippy toes to their zenith, shoulder reaching out to its socket’s limit, an optic yellow ball of fur suspended at the edge of nail-nubbed fingertips. The higher the release point, the more time was allowed for the ball to reach the greatest speeds. Stretching, teetering, poised and suspended, that pregnant moment before the release. And then, ah, the sweet rush of speed as gravity pulls at it all.
In AP physics, the tendrils thickened to rootlets, the boundary between their viny tongues and the bends and twists of my cortex blurred. The linear nature of objects falling through space, you see, took on the nature of three dimensions. I recognized Newton’s apple falling toward the Earth as my fuzzy yellow tennis ball speeding toward the linoleum floor. But now, the question begged, what if Newton did not just drop his apple but threw it with all his might, horizontally, in a direction parallel to the ground? What if his apple could reach some critical speed such that it would travel so far in the horizontal direction that it barely had time to begin its descent? My mind hummed as thoughts spiraled around themselves. Speed was the most influential variable here, not time, for if the apple moved fast enough to cover sufficient ground, it’s incremental descent over a long enough distance could equal the exact distance the Earth dropped away from itself. In this model, Newton’s apple, my yellow tennis ball, would trace a circle around the Earth, the latter’s gravitational pull bending with the contour of the surface. Such is the magical self-perpetuating nature of the sphere, tracing a line that is not straight but falling down toward itself. The ball would fall forever, endlessly falling but never losing it height. Orbits. My theory of gravity was compounding.
There was a third defining moment in my understanding of the early tennis ball experiments. I can recall one specific memory as a pink-skinned 19 year old, my backpack resting under my feet on the auditorium floor. I was privileged and belligerent, full of myself and yet lacking a self yet defined, just another pompous undergrad within a dark room whose round walls echoed in the sadness of youth wasted. I stared down below, pencil poised in the ready, beyond the straight black heads of hair like dots of light in the night. There, behind a great wooden podium, an untouchable Nobel laureate preached to the eager congregation. We, the newborn flock, were not yet allowed thoughts of our own. Our job was to hang on the preacher’s every word, indoctrination by generational repetition. Physics is at once two things and one, the first step of a long journey of an ordainment in the Sciences or another chink in the pre-med belt, both a means to some end. Gravity, the professor explained, is a two way street. My heart skipped a beat. Two bodies in space, he declared from his reverse Mount Sainai, exert a gravitational field upon one another. A beat. Could it be? This would change everything. I had always understood that the Earth pulled at the apple. But now, as I understood the sermon, so too does the apple pull at the Earth. The important variable here, however, was not time nor speed but mass.
Time moves forward, and the teachings from our youth blend to the wisdom of our years. The curious boy became a man, and now new concepts precipitate and crystallize, marinate and then radiate from the self same mind. These are his musings, this blog, these words. They are imperfect as are all such attempts, but so too are we humans, this common human condition of suffering and pondering, living and experiencing this world, this life. But despite our disparate paths that lead us to this moment, here we are, now, together. And my suspicion is that these words that clunk and complicate as they chug forward converge on a common pinpoint of light that we all have seen, we all have known. It is the interconnectedness of us all, you to me and me to you, both of us to all of our fellow men and women and the sum total of experiences that color this great world.
Gravity. Orbits. Time. Speed. Mass. Connection.
It took me some time to understand that I am the apple. That you are the tennis ball. That we are all objects of mass in space exerting our forces on one another as we bounce like pachinko balls through time, collisions both elastic and inelastic, each influencing the other as we go. I studied this in my practice of medicine, how abusive husbands dirtied their wives, micromanaging parents cast shadows on their children, venomous bosses poisoned their employees. In my mind, I imagined these human dualities like tiny planets spinning around themselves in orbits of variable proximity, some fast and tight, codependent and seemingly two reflections of the same face, others loose and relatively independent, each a part of the other but more subtle, echoes of faint undertones. Each being, you see, has his or her own gravity. I experienced this for myself, varying from one moment to the next as the clinic’s doors slid open and closed, each room containing a different patient with their burdens laid bare as wet clothes in the drying sun, each a unique color that altered my own, its shade reflected in mine.
The falseness of a permanent self became even more obvious in the drastic contrasts of transition. Returning home after a grueling day of work, Tracey fell into the habit of declaring herself as not another of my employees, apparently reacting to my barking of orders and meticulous expectations. What had become of the patient and fun-loving man she once loved? Beers with the boys. Scratching for big waves in the pack. Cuddling my daughter. Teaching my boy to be a man. The collection of mass I knew best, this human I called myself, was breaking physic’s rules, was shapeshifting from one form to another. The variable here that seemed most important was proximity. Distance. Whoever’s energy was closest to me exerted the most influence.
But distance perpetuated over time… Herein was the birthplace of something entirely new to my theory of gravity, some next order derivative that was greater than the sum total of the parts that made it up. Patterns — habit, dependence, attenuation, change. Like Thoreau’s virgin meadow that too-quickly gave way to well-trodden trails, the infinite potential of a human’s life quickly and unconsciously becomes limited by our past footprints. But to realize the placement of these steps are as much a result of individual choice as the will of the gravitational field of those around closest to us challenges the notion of free will and a life that is our own. The more I explored such concepts, the more I recognized the ego-deleting fact that the unique and definable individual that I once saw as me is less me than the amalgam of we, I am not, as Popeye professed, what I am, but what we are, what we do, galvanized by how long we are together, how long we engage in the activities that forge the arc of our lives.
And so it stands, tonight, 30,000 feet above the Earth traveling over 500 mph in a horizontal vector, racing East, away from my well-trodden life on my tiny green island in the middle of the Pacific. And so it stands, tonight, an overhead ding that signals our initial decent, the fingertips loosening their grasp on a yellow ball that hangs poised, suspended. Below, Barcelona, Spain, a year-long sabbatical that stretches off in the distance like a jet-lagged dawn, a fantasized embrace. We have pushed pause on the life’s streaming, my wife, my son, my two daughters. And as we clear our ears and straighten our seat backs to their upright positions, toes stretched to their zenith, I wonder why I feel so ill-prepared yet fear and anxiety are nowhere to be found. And then, of course, it all becomes clear.
You see, it took a great Newtonian heave from that place in our past to deliver me here, free from the ties that bound me, a single unencumbered body floating through life. Here, I am immersed in the present, am finally allowed to act spontaneously within the world. I am affected only by that which surrounds me, the people I loves, the activities I choose To reach this moment was a heroic labor of exhaustion, so overwhelming that it took all of my effort and attention just to reach the velocity that allowed my escape from the gravity of my orbit. The clinic and all of its beauty, all of its suffering, a buzzing hive of humanity swirling in pain and need and distress. That was my star. I cannot recall a moment in which I didn’t feel its gravity, voracious, insatiable, a swirling vortex that sucked me into its tight orbit as a black hole robs the universe of even the light that strays too near. Finding and training a replacement doctor, signing out how to open the tailgate of my truck that tends to get stuck or how to fix the electric underground dog fence, Will’s alcoholism and the interplay with is depression, how to clean the hot tub without burning out its motor, Michael’s tenuous kidneys and his delicate way, who will check the mail, sign the checks the bills, Aunty Kay’s heart and the brittle line between her lungs’ drowning and dehydration, change the names on the car insurance, restain the deck, confirm there are no foreign transaction fees on the credit cards, switch the old number to the new cell phones, change medical insurance, pack the bags, reduce 20 years of possessions to a neat stack of boxes, schedule the providers for the July clinic schedule, say goodbye to the dog… Funny, I had yet to put any energy into where it is that I am headed. The binding on the books whose block letters spell Spain had yet to be cracked. And yet, here, the descent.
28 years, this journey into and within medicine. So very much time.
Days of 40 patients squeezed into 8 hours, 3 growing squirrely still waiting through lunch, pharmacists on hold, 5 voicemails to call back, 3 from the hospital, two from my lawyer, a triple-digit overnight inbox on the phone, 72 hour emergency room shifts pulled every other Sunday to Wednesday, the sole doctor on a neighbor island 100 miles away. Such breakneck speed.
The Clinic, Godzilla, a monster of super sized proportions, 20,000 patient visits per year, the ultimate responsibility for some 5000 lives and all that can go wrong, the heaviness of such a thing on my shoulders. Oh futile Atlas, the epic mass.
Day in, day out, drafting protocols, hiring physicians, managing billing, watching the numbers, fixing broken lights, endlessly charting, supervising physician assistants and nurse practitioners, reviewing the list of who received narcotics from our office, returning calls… I have been in this routine so long it occupies my dreams. This mass is so great, these paths worn so deep.
The tennis ball, that fuzzy yellow perfect globe, its own planet Earth. It had spun around its own little sun for so very long, and somehow, against all odds, it broke free from its gravity. A tangential line has been drawn, a new vector accelerates not toward the well-known linoleum floor but outwards, somewhere new, and the forces that will affect it, will inflect it, which will be forever changed because of it, remain hidden like an unopened box wrapped in ribbons under a child’s blinking tree.
But for now, this descent, traveling through space, unbound, free from gravity’s heavy hand, this exhilarating life, this fresh ride, each breath a gift, a pregnant moment promising to birth new magic, suspended, poised, stretching, reaching, before the release.
I let go of my grip and feel the familiar slip away, the release. And then, ah, the sweet rush of speed as gravity pulls at it all.