As busy, passionate women where our careers are one and the same as our lives, we often refer to the PATH that we are on. We’re on a ‘career path’ or we’re ‘climbing the corporate ladder’. Not to mention the idea of age and the yearly increments of an additional single number. These are very specific images when it comes to our life’s journey: there is a start and an end point with a straight line between. If we can’t move past a certain point along that line, then we conceivably will never get to our end desired point. If we don’t get past the flying monkeys or the poppy field on the yellow brick road, then we’ll never get to The Emerald City. If we don’t get that series regular role on a TV series by the time we are 30, then our acting career will never be successful. The visual of ‘The Path’ seems counter productive to me. And it doesn’t address the force that is moving us along it.
So what if we’re not on a path, or a ladder… but an orbit? Almost everything in our known universe has one, from a moon, to an asteroid, a planet, a solar system, down to an electron…traveling on an nano highway of bent space time due to the gravitational pull of a nucleus. So why not us? Our ancestors mistook the earth for flat because they just trusted what their eyes told them. So can’t we be equally mislead that’s we’re on a linear path through life because of that pesky thing called age? It’s been proven, besides, that time is relative and history repeats itself (the latter not scientifically true but I’m sure Einstein would agree). So if we look at our life as an elliptical orbit, as opposed to a straight line that jets off into Neverland, it gives us an interesting platform from which to analyze life..and the physics to change it. Cool?
Orbits rely partly on the gravitational pull of the object that it is traveling around, and of it’s initial velocity (my friend Phil Plait aka Bad Astronomer is going to kill me for vague science), so you can think of one’s family, social and financial circumstances creating a person’s orbit when they are first born, their expressed genes determining their velocity. Or some semblance of that equation. If they do nothing to steer themselves off course, not expending any energy to find a new center of gravity and/ or adult their trajectory, their course is set. Their life ends where it began, dust to dust (though remember energy can never be created or destroyed, just saying). So is our orbit predetermined? HELL NO! That’s the beauty of physics. I like to think about what Bruce Willis did in Armageddon: He used an explosive event to change the orbit of that pesky asteroid threatening Earth. BOOM! One simple little nuclear explosion and 6 billion people are saved and that asteroid continues it’s elliptical vacation through our solar system. “Right, but didn’t you see how hard it was to drill into that carbonite sucker!?” you ask. We don’t have that much mass. And we have a brain. We can change our own course if we just take action. Even the pull of gravity, that mysterious force and/ or field currently eluding the unified equation is not strong enough, at least in these four dimensions, that we can’t readjust our ‘gravitational center’ and thus our orbit.
So what part of our universe do you want your life to circle through? What are the course adjustments that will pull you towards it and how will you adjust your center of gravity to entice it towards you? It all sounds very scientific, but you just have to take mindful ACTION. Assess your life, clean up your ‘hard drive’ and the emotional baggage that may be hampering the efficiency of your amazing neural center aka your brain. Figure out your power, embrace what you are brilliant at, while assigning value to your vulnerability, as your flaws are what make you human, thus worthy of the journey you’re on. And then see the universe around you, where you want to travel through, what you want to experience and then make a change that reroutes you. Make the bold move, or take many small steps. Change won’t be immediate though. We haven’t master quantum teleportation just yet 🙂 We still have to travel. But remember, we’re always traveling, we always have velocity, we’ll get somewhere, even if we make no changes. And soon you are crossing orbits with other energetic beings that add kinetic energy to your journey and inspire you to make even bigger ‘course adjustments’. Because one change in course, when taking into account a curved path, puts you in line with countless new opportunities and people, not just one. If you want to change your life, you have to change your orbit.
And as you go farther along your curved journey, you can look across space time and see where you came from, look back, look across, learn from those experiences, gain meaning from them, value them. Everything’s connected.