The Orbit Continues

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Warning: This post contains some science and some math, but it’s brief and I promise there is a valid reason for including that stuff. (Science I love, math not so much.)

I love to travel; I always have. Each day on the road is a new adventure. My parents shared road trip adventures with my siblings and me, and I have shared road trip adventures with my children and grandchildren. I can’t even make a good guess about how many miles I’ve driven on those road trips—probably more than 50,000 miles over the prior ten years.

Windows down, wind in your hair—coffee gone cold in a paper cup and a bug-splattered windshield. On many of our trips west, the first night is often spent somewhere around Joplin, Missouri. A hard eight-and-a-half-hour day just to reach 550 miles from our front door. It makes me tired thinking about it right now. Traffic around St. Louis: ugh! I keep reminding myself there really isn’t a big hurry, so why do I keep trying to hurry?

If you want to talk about real travel, hop out of my front seat and think about the following numbers.

Right now we are all moving around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Even more amazing is the fact that those chunks of time around the sun that we call years—each of those chunks represents about 584 million miles.

We travel millions of miles without ever feeling the wind in our hair, and those orbits around the sun are only one part of our constant motion. We rotate, we circle the sun, which moves through the Milky Way, which moves through space, yet none of us feels a thing—no motion at all. It’s dead calm. No air rushing through an open window and not even the hum of tires on the pavement. Just quiet. A silence so complete it erases the evidence of movement.

We see the stars move across the sky; we see the sun rise and set. It doesn’t feel like we have moved, and yet we have. We move constantly at 18 to 19 miles per second. As you have read this sentence, you’ve already traveled about 100 miles through space.

By the time you finish a cup of coffee, you’ve gone nearly 7,000 miles. That’s just our orbit around the sun. Add in rotation, the sun’s movement through the galaxy, and the galaxy’s drift, and we’re traveling far faster than we can imagine—or at least faster than my math can calculate.

Over a good night’s sleep, you travel farther than most people will ever fly. That would make my trips to Joplin a lot quicker and more relaxing. Maybe that is the source of our dreams—our nightly travels translated.

We travel millions of miles during our lives but never feel it until something changes. Illness, loss, love, fear—and suddenly we notice the motion, the lack of it, or a sudden whipsaw change of direction.

If you want science, then I point you toward gravity. It keeps all the seemingly random movement in some sort of order. The science of gravity is known. What it does is known. It can be measured, and we know what would happen without gravity. Frustratingly, we still don’t understand the most basic thing about gravity—what it actually is.

We are left with this: we have an unknown thing, from an unknown place, doing known things, mostly to our benefit. Yet even without us knowing more about it, we continue to benefit from it. You might say it works because it works.

All of this is somewhat like saying: We know how Quentin behaves. We can catalog his habits, flaws, and predictable responses. But we don’t know him in a deep, fundamental sense. And maybe—if he’s honest—he doesn’t either.

Shortly before completing my 77th orbit around the sun—another 584 million miles—gravity decided to file a reminder that it doesn’t hand out extensions or tickets to additional orbits.

A quiet Saturday night. A winter storm due to arrive within hours, so carryout food and some winter hibernation in front of the TV seemed like a perfect way to spend the evening. It felt like an ordinary winter evening. Four hours later, it proved to be anything but ordinary. An allergic reaction turned into a sudden and serious case of angioedema. A friend drove me to the local hospital emergency room.

After walking into the ER registration area, I have no memory of events until about eight hours later, when I woke up in the ICU at a large Indianapolis hospital. I’m told the ambulance ride from Lafayette to Indianapolis was memorable (not for me) after the ambulance was involved in a collision between two semi-trucks on the snow-covered interstate. I’m here, repaired, and my body is adjusting to that brief wobble in my orbit.

One week later, I completed that 77th orbit—bringing the total to nearly 45 billion miles around the sun, but who’s counting? No wonder my feet hurt.

I’m not special. Gravity has a long client list. The truth is everyone has their own orbital wobble sooner or later. Mine just happened to arrive in the same week as a birthday. Efficient, if nothing else.

This story isn’t about math or gravity. It’s about life—and not really my life. Here, at about the 45 billion-mile marker, I was reminded that the number of our revolutions is not guaranteed. We are not in control of the equation. Each year, as we begin a new solar orbit, we assume the orbit will complete itself. We assume the math will keep working because it always has. Sometimes we assume too much—but maybe that assumption is easier to live with.

Apparently gravity still has plans for me. I’m choosing to cooperate—at least until the next speed bump.