Gravity

As a five-year-old, sitting in the backseat of the car, I looked up at the moon as a celestial body moving alongside me, everywhere I went. Even at the highest speeds, it felt like it was on the journey with me. It has looked over me for decades. I have been in love for as long as I can remember with the skies that happen to be more with me than the things on earth that came so close yet didn’t stay on the journey. At six, I learned it was with me even in the day when I couldn’t see it. At seven, I learned it was still full when I only saw half. At eight, I understood that even an eclipse is an illusion. The moon has always, fully and completely, been with me, pulling me with all of its gravity.

I keep learning new things about its presence even today. I am made of the same stardust the moon is made of. Even though I can’t touch it, I am entangled with it at the quantum level. Somehow the pull from the moon’s gravity taught me more about life than life itself. The universe has had a way of always making me feel understood, seen, witnessed. Even on the loneliest nights, I have not felt alone. Even on the days I didn’t feel understood, I felt like there was someone watching.

The moon moves with me even when it’s so far away. So do some people in life. The people who you come across and instantly feel a pull toward. You feel as though they move with you. Then one day you don’t see them. That’s just the sun shining brighter than the moon. You’re still pulled by the gravity of the moon. It’s still exactly where it was. You just can’t see it. The magnetism keeps drawing you back. The person who you undertook all your journeys with, suddenly disappears into the light. It made me learn that connection doesn’t die even when it loses contact. It’s just on the other side, executing its dharma.

The sunflower’s dharma is to move with the sun. Without that, it’s not a sunflower. The river’s dharma is to flow. Without that, it becomes a pond, a lake. The moon’s dharma is to revolve around the earth, in a cosmic dance of gravity. Without that, it loses its being, loses itself. 

When people disappear from your life, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t feel the connection the same way you do. It only means that like constellations moving across the sky, they form conjunctions when they align. Everyone ultimately moves. Everything ultimately drifts.

Some encounters are not just conjunctions. These are the people, the celestial bodies, that actually collide. And in doing so, they alter each other’s trajectories forever. The meant-to-be that didn’t last for an eternity was a meant-to-be that you had to collide with in order to align yourself with a new path. The collision is shattering, physically in the skies and emotionally between people. It leaves wreckage, but that wreckage is a necessary form of shedding that one needed for the course to come. 

Then there are relationships that are a different kind of collision. They are the ones that consume each other completely, merging, and forming something entirely new from the wreckage. Even the moon itself is a result of one such collision. If the collision is slow and happens between two stars that are alike, it gives rise to a beautiful merge that feels like a ‘not knowing where I end and you begin’. You become one with such stars and grow bigger and brighter.

When two neutron stars find each other across the dark, they don’t simply drift towards each other. Their gravity pulls them inward, faster and faster in a spiral. The loop tightens itself, quicker and quicker, until there is nothing in between them. The collision, gives rise to a kilonova, which is one of the most violent and luminous events witnessed by the cosmos. It is an explosion that is so bright that it outshines an entire galaxy. Makes me wonder how something that destroys us can be so illuminating. It is indeed, most times, since it wakes us up. The heaviest elements in existence like platinum and gold are born in the aftermath of two stars completely consuming each other. In a way, stars don’t leave wreckage, they leave gold.

Some people enter our lives with a different kind of density; an intensity so strong that you feel their mass before they’re even close. You know it in your bones that something is wrecking you. These are the relationships that become all consuming, almost destructive. When they hit, it doesn’t feel like growth, it feels like annihilation! The gravity pulls two people into a collision that crosses a threshold from which there is no coming back. That kilonova tears through your beliefs, identities and everything in between. The versions of yourself you spent years assembling, scatter in a flash. You are no longer the same person you were before you met them.

In some cases, what remains after the explosion, crosses another threshold entirely and collapses into a singularity. That happens when it carries enough mass even post that apocalyptic encounter that kills your world. If something is still left within you, you become a whole different species after that collapse. At first it may feel like the hole left behind is a void. But in reality, this is the hole that becomes so strong in holding its ground that not even light can escape it. It pulls everything in its path towards itself. 

Even the most destructive encounters can end up being the ones that ultimately centre you. You burn so much that it feels like you don’t exist at all. But you eventually find yourself with a gravity so strong, a character so solid, that no power in the universe can shake your core. When you look back at those events, from your evolved self, you realise that those encounters helped in designing the new shape of you. You don’t find your gravity after coming across these people, but you become it. The inward quest that you step into post these encounters turns you toward becoming the singularity yourself.

There is another kind of entanglement, the most beautiful one at that. It is among the stars that spend billions of years in a mutual orbit. They don’t drift and they don’t collide. They are held together in each other’s arms through their gravity. They are at exactly the right distance where there is no crisis that alters their orbit and there is no storm that shakes their alignment. They simply continue, they simply co-exist. These are the relationships that don’t announce themselves. They belong to a category of presence that doesn’t need an absence to make itself felt. 

These people are not felt through intensity but are sensed through continuity. They exhibit the quiet miracle, of continuing to circle each other without missing a beat. It isn’t a miracle that is spectacular, it is the one that is necessary. It is like one of those involuntary actions our body performs in the background without our realisation, but are the ones that keep us alive!

A different kind of elegance lives in that endurance. It is the beauty of consistency that feeds the slow transformation that happens when someone simply keeps showing up. There is no drama, and there is no drift. Only a person, who is there, constantly, next to you, on the other side. They give you the light you need to grow. 

It could be with a person, or it could simply be one of your past selves. You could be playing that role right now, for your future self without even knowing it, by simply showing up. You can be that person for yourself by simply waking up each morning and bringing consistency through repeated actions that feed your growth.

I have been thinking about versions of me in retrospect for some time now. As a five-year-old in the backseat of that car, I didn’t know how much I would learn from the moon moving alongside me. At six, I was learning that presence doesn’t require visibility. At seven, I was learning that wholeness doesn’t require full display and at eight, I was understanding how an eclipse is always an illusion. 

I was learning about mutual orbits. I was unaware that the cosmos was making me aware of the people who would show up, the ones who would drift away, and the ones who would collide and in doing so, transform me. The reason showed up only when my adult version stopped and looked back. 

For the longest time, I resisted the gravity that pulled me but eventually surrendered to it. I took it for destiny and let myself flow with it. In turn, like a stone in the river’s flow, I kept getting hit, kept getting eroded. It was only with time that I realised that even the celestial bodies might not be pulled by gravity, but through their own energy and mass, they could be bending the fabric of space and time causing things around them to change path on the curvature of the bend. I am causing things around me to shift through my own energy, through my own mass. I am gravity, myself.

Even if that is not true, and if gravity is actually fated, I still have the power to resist it as a conscious being unlike heavenly bodies. I can’t choose the situations I encounter, but I can choose how I react to them. After all, I am not a stone in the river but a fish, who is fully alive and capable of swimming upstream.

The becoming, the awareness, the consciousness that I could finally identify with showed up only after the constant conjunctions and collisions. The moon, that stayed a witness to that journey is itself an outcome of a planetary collision. A journey which took me from being pulled by gravity to becoming it.

This essay sits at the intersection of Nature & Cosmos, Mind & Entanglement and Time & The Threshold.