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 and 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 if 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. People you come across and feel an instant 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 rotate 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. Scientists call it dark energy. The invisible force that keeps everything moving apart.
Then there are distant stars that collide and consume each other completely, merging, or 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, ‘not knowing where I end and you begin’. You become one with such stars and grow bigger and brighter.
Some encounters are not conjunctions. They don’t brush past and redirect. They collide.
When two neutron stars find each other across the dark, their approach is not a drift. It is a spiral. Gravity pulls them inward faster and faster, tightening the loop, until the distance between them collapses entirely. What follows is one of the most violent and luminous events the cosmos produces: a kilonova. An explosion so bright it briefly outshines an entire galaxy. In the wreckage, gold is forged. Platinum. The heaviest elements in existence are born only here, in the aftermath of two stars destroying each other. The stars don’t leave wreckage. They leave gold.
Some people arrive with a different kind of density. The intensity so strong that you feel their mass before they’re close. Relationships that become all consuming, almost destructive. When they hit, it doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like annihilation. The gravity pulls them into a fast moving inward spiral, tightening until the collision crosses a threshold, the threshold of no return, and the kilonova tears through everything. Beliefs. Identities. Versions of yourself you spent years assembling. These encounters are not mere collisions. What remains after the explosion, if it carries enough mass, crosses another threshold entirely and collapses into a singularity. At first it may feel like the hole left behind is a void. In reality, this is the hole that becomes so strong in holding its ground that not even light can escape it. It pulls toward itself everything in its path. 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. But you eventually find yourself with a gravity so strong, a character so solid, that no power in the universe can shake your core. Looking back from your evolved self, you realise those encounters designed the new shape of you. You don’t find your gravity. You become it. You unlock your inward quest into becoming the singularity.
And then there is a third kind.
The stars that spend billions of years in quiet mutual orbit. Not drifting, not colliding. Each held in place by the other’s gravity at exactly the right distance. No crisis corrects the orbit. No storm realigns them. They simply continue. These are the relationships that don’t announce themselves. The presence that doesn’t need an absence to make itself felt. You notice them not through intensity but through continuity. The quiet, unspectacular miracle of continuing to circle each other without falling away and without colliding. That endurance is its own kind of alchemy.
It’s consistency. Not the drama of collision, not the drift of dark energy, but the slow transformation that happens when someone simply keeps showing up. A person who is there, constantly, next to you, on the other side. They give you the light you need to grow. They provide water to your intellectual garden for it to grow. It could be a different person, it could 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, waking up each morning and bringing consistency through repeated actions that feed your growth.
The meaning of those moments only becomes visible looking back. The five year old in the backseat didn’t know she was learning about quiet orbits. She didn’t know the moon was teaching her about the people who would show up and the ones who would drift and the ones who would collide and transform her.
I have been thinking about that version of me in retrospect for some time now. The one watching the moon move with her through the car window, learning about life from the cosmos. At six, she learned that presence doesn’t require visibility. At seven, she learned that wholeness doesn’t require full display. At eight, she understood that the eclipse is always the illusion.
All the events were lined up like a domino. They were all already there, preparing her, in a language she wouldn’t have the words for until much later. This is backward causality in action. The future participating in defining what the past ultimately was. The significance of past events only becoming clear from the other side. Finally making it clear what it was quietly preparing you for.
To see this, you have to stop moving outward and turn around. You have to become the witness of your own becoming. Not the pursuer of the next encounter, the next idea, the next horizon, but the one who watches what has already been unfolding. That turning is the inward quest.
The gravity in the universe keeps pulling us to the same lesson in different languages. In the language of neutron stars and quiet orbits. In the language of dharma and dark energy. In the language of a curious child and a moon moving through the night. Through countless encounters, some conjunctions, some collisions, some never-ending symphonies in a quiet mutual orbit.
We know that the outward quest has no finish line. The universe holds more knowledge than a single lifetime could ever let you consume. Even a hundred years of living, learning, questioning amounts to a single drop in an endless ocean of knowledge, curiosity and desire. At some point you realise the quest itself might be an illusion. The answers might not live at the other end of the ocean. They may reside in the stillness. They live where no gravity is pulling you. It makes one wonder, Is the inward quest a direction or an ultimate destination? Is that what emergence really is? Is that what becoming is?
This essay sits at the intersection of Resonance, Nature & Cosmos, and The Threshold.