My little sister won’t endure my spinning anymore, but she still pushes me (and her daughter) to spin faster…
My sisters and I were taught about lots of miracles in Sunday school. A few loaves of bread and a couple of fish multiplying to feed 5,000. Jesus healing lepers, making the blind see, bringing Lazarus back to life. An empty tomb and a risen savior.
But in second grade I learned of the biggest miracle that, incredulously, nobody seems to marvel over — the fact that the Earth, the very ground we’re all standing on, is spinning at about 1,000 mph. That means we are all moving, all the time, even though we can’t feel it happening.
My 8-year-old brain exploded at the thought.
My sons and I were recently talking about this on an evening when the moon was a glowing crescent, the kind that would cradle an angler as she cast a line off its tip, and they asked me what it looked like to the people on the other side of the world. So with the help of my frequent co-parent YouTube, we watched the trajectory and phases of the moon, and we learned how the Earth spins on its axis. We also saw how “our” planet is moving around the sun at about 67,000 mph, and that our solar system is moving through the galaxy at about 515,000 mph.
It’s dizzying to think about all that moving we’re doing as I stand here, quite still.
When I was a kid my favorite thing to do was spin. At the playground I ran for the tire swing, hung parallel to the ground. Id sit on it with my apprehensive little sister, digging my toes into the sand beneath it to turn us faster and faster and faster until she begged me to stop.
I loved spinning. I loved seeing the whole world blur around me until the only things I could see clearly were my own limbs and the person directly across from me on the tire, their smile wild, their insides being tickled the same way my insides were being tickled.
Now I see that apart from the same cosmic ride we’re on together, each of us is also spinning in our own orbits, following the unique trajectories of our lives at different speeds. We turn from darkness to light and back again, from helplessness to hopefulness, from love to loss, all the while bumping into or crossing through one another’s orbits as we go, trying like hell to straighten our paths, to slow down or speed up, treating others like they are moons to our existence rather than planets of their own.
And despite our best efforts at selflessness and compassion, the rest of the world often blurs so that we see only our own flailing limbs and persistent dreams. It’s human nature. It’s the desperate call of our fragile hearts. It’s all of us doing the best we can with what we’re facing at the moment.
I watch those around me spinning, facing the darkness, feeling the light, waiting and praying and digging their toes into the sand to change their direction or speed or perspective. Navigating parenthood and marriage, failed businesses and failing relationships, addiction and recovery and illness and death and a hundred other things, some of them too dark to even imagine myself enduring.
This, too, is the same for the people on the other side of the world.
Gloria, a 21-year-old college student from Rwanda, was recently telling me about the lingering effects of the 1994 genocide in her country, a mass killing of 800,000 in a matter of 100 days. Half of her mother’s family and almost all of her father’s were slaughtered. Gloria was born three years later, but her life has been altered and defined by her parents’ pain.
“There wasn’t time to process their emotions when everything happened,” she said. “They had to rebuild. They had to dig graves. They had to find bodies. There was so much to be done. So the assumption was ‘After we clean up, after we rebuild and get to a good place, then we can deal with our emotions.’ But that time hasn’t come yet.”
For three months terror and evil had flung Gloria’s parents, her entire homeland, into chaos. And the ensuing, persistent grief slowed their individual orbits to a crawl, their hearts adjusting to the dark side of the moon rather than pushing toward the light around the bend.
“Most of my friends are struggling to deal with parents who have been through so much that they don’t even know how to love anymore,” Gloria said with heartbreaking matter-of-factness. “Not because they don’t love their kids, but they’ve seen some of the most horrible things you can ever think of, and the whole idea of love has died.”
If three-quarters of my extended family were slaughtered, would the mere thought of loving someone freely again be too painful a thing to bear? How would I will myself to keep spinning at all?
Maybe that’s where the miracle comes in. We are all moving, despite our failings and our fears, whether we think we can’t or shouldn’t or couldn’t possibly do it right. When we don’t know where to turn, we already are. When I sit down and cry, I’m still moving forward. When you close your eyes and breathe and ask for guidance, maybe your answer is in the sunrise and the seasons.
The Earth turns. The gravitational pull of the sun spins us around it. The solar system glides forward, one jumbled mass of planets and stars and moons and heartbreak. How comforting to know that when I think I am utterly alone or hopelessly lost, there is a part of my existence whose pace and trajectory are always a mirror image of yours, and they are perfect — just look at the sunrise. And the seasons.
At 1,000 mph, we spin together. Nobody is alone. We are all on the ride, myself and Gloria’s mother, the addict I love and the friend whose wife just moved out, the woman who recently lost her dad and the mother who miscarried again and the father of four who’s battling cancer and the kid at the park today who’s pushing off on that old tire swing with all the power she’s got in her little legs. May she always be as confident and adventurous as she is right now. But if she ever falters, it’s OK.
She’s with us.