Spinning

I’ve been percolating for a few days on this idea of change. Why are most humans so uncomfortable with change? One of my friends recently told me she did wash, not because she was out of clean clothes, but because she was out of her favorite clean clothes. See what I mean? We like to get cozy with certain things, places and patterns in our lives and just stay there. Like our favorite clothes, our patterns are our comfort. That is, until our patterns become a rut. That, how ever is a whole ‘nother matter and I’m just contemplating the why of change in the here and now. (Remember, I’m really practicing being rather than doing, and being means just being here and now).

So I watched a good movie a few nights ago, Martian Child. I got it because that handsome guy John Chusak is in it and I figured even if the movie was a bomb the scenery would be great , and the movie was actually good and John was looking great. He’s aging with style and I’m looking forward to the release of the movie he wrote and produced called War Inc., due out in October. Originally scheduled for release last spring, now it won’t be out ‘till after the elections- geeze, wonder why? Dan Ackroyd will be in it as well, it’s a follow up to the movie Grosse Pointe Blank that they did together way back when, so that right there makes it worth seeing.

Any-hoo, in Martian Child John’s character makes a long speech about how weird this whole life is, we are spinning on a planet ( 700 to 1000 miles an hour depending on if you are at the equator or the poles), around a spinning star ( the sun spins at a speed of 4,400 miles an hour) in the spinning arm of galaxy ( our galaxy spins at 140 miles a second) that’s spinning across the universe ( at 190 miles a second), meanwhile every atom in our body is spinning and I said Eureka! That is it!

Maybe we all cling to our favorite clothes because we are so tiny, little, small. We are to small to actually see and feel all this enormous movement that is going on all around us but maybe at some instinctual level we know, we can feel, our DNA twirl, our atoms spinning, our earth revolving around the sun which spins in a solar system, spinning in a galaxy that spins out across the never ending void of the universe.

Just look around you, every moment is change and every season is change. Just sit in the yard and watch the lawn grow, the flowers bloom and die. Or drive around your favorite town. Homes go up, buildings come down, business opens and another closes. Look at your photo album, you once looked like that, every day you changed a little, now you look like this. It can’t be stopped.

You are constantly changing, as your cells die and new ones are replacing them. You think you have the same body your whole life, but really, all your cells are replaced many times over your life so even your same body is an illusion. No wonder we are grasping for a little stability!

We are so little, tiny, small that we can’t feel the earth spinning, but maybe we know. Maybe somehow we do feel all this never ending motion that makes up our very being and our whole incredibly humongous environment. Maybe at some level all that large moving stuff makes us feel like an ant holding onto the branch of a tree in the fall wind. Holding on for dear life as everything swirls on around, holding on just trying to remain with feet planted .

Maybe we are just craving some small spot of stillness. A place of no movement. A place to hold on. Maybe our favorite clothes, the painting that has hung on that wall in that house for 30 years, the favorite recliner tattered and worn, the familiar grocery store with every item exactly where we expect it to be helps us to forget for a moment that we, just like everything else in existence are spinning. Maybe we can’t help this clinging, maybe we think if we let go of our familiar, our routine our same whatever- maybe we think we are going to spin right off into space.

And even though a favorite shirt lasts maybe 8 or 10 years, and that is an amazing infinitesimal amount of time when it comes to the span of time in space, maybe because we are so small, just having that same thing, place, person or routine for ten years makes us confident, gives us stillness and a thread of consistency to hang on to. Maybe it makes us feel like we are moving in the stillness rather than still in the movingness. Maybe it gives us a feeling of rest.

Maybe we are resistant to change because if we can just hold a few things still in our tiny lives, we can feel like we are bigger than we are. We can feel like we are in control. Then maybe our intuitive understanding of the vastness and the speed of it all won’t be quite so scary.