Gravity

Coldplay, Talk

It has been said many a time, by many a master and many a fool, that each one of us is permanently at war. With ourselves. We know this to be true. Each of us humans at some point in life, sometimes as early as our teenage years and certainly by the time we reach the wretched mid-life fortyish-year-old threshold, admits to the unforgiving truism: I have battles going on in here, that no-one else can see, or understand, or win. Wars are made up of battles, as are we.

We fight, we spat, we squabble, we quarrel with our inner daemons. We attack our dreams and defend our shadow. We weaponize our inner psychological army with multiple personalities. Each day we awake, realizing it is completely possible, even plausible, we may cry that day. Everyday. We may die that day. Any day. We may rejoice, we may be reborn, we may have the most bland of days that day. Each day, a single blot, a single battle waged against our very own selves. What most of us fails to realize, another war we fight, as individuals, every single second of every single day, is with gravity. The infinite force of the Multiverse. We belong to a very specific time and space, we all belong to gravity. From the moment we wake up trying to get out of bed, to succumbing to the sofa late at night, exhausted by our daily skirmish to stay above earth, just one more day. At our core, we humans are gravity-fighters, each losing the brawl in the end. It’s not the final victory we seek, it’s fighting the good fight. It’s living the good life.

Some claim there may have been enlightened humans, who through time, won their inner war, conquered their inner daemons, raised above their own traumas and scars. That may be true, but none of them won the war against gravity. At the end, it always wins, it always holds the trophy. No matter how much you battle, gravity will bury your in the ground. If you try to outsmart gravity and ask your grandkids to scatter your ashes over the mountain top, hoping that you may rise above the land and that you may be virtuous against the pull of gravity after your physical death, the next rainfall will bring you back down to your final destination. Earth. It buries you deeper than any coffin, deep into the minerals of the land, into the underground of streams and rock.

It’s a long war, and most of us are fortunate enough to win almost all of its first battles. We grow taller, further and further away from the ground, away from gravity’s center. Our skin stretches out smoothly. We learn to climb trees and mountains and skyscrapers. We see hope. We see immortality reflected in the mirror, and live the illusion that gravity’s eternal and unfavoring pull does not have such a grip on us.

But it’s the last decades of battles that truly enlighten us. Unflatteringly. Our skin starts to yield first, the baggy peel under our eyes, after three or four decades of gravity pulling down. One day, gravity looks you in the mirror mirror on the wall and replies “let the drooping begin!”. It gets painfully ridiculous: boobs start to droop, balls hang at the knees, saggy skin covering our triceps, hair falling off faster than it rejuvenates. Wrinkles. These are the war scars of our lost battles against gravity. When the time is right, gravity takes a plunge and attacks with a second chin right under the original one. We are now heavier, rather than just bigger.

We lose. Gravity wins.

It's been that way since the beginning of time: the Earth fights the sun’s gravitational pull but, with each year, it grows closer to it. The Moon fights the Earth’s gravitational pull but gravity is in it for the long run. It has all the time in the universe, and all the space, too. It doesn’t need luck. It won the war before the very first battle, on the very day of your conception. It is the ultimate warlord. Without gravity, our universe would be insipidly-perfectly-uniformly boring. This distortion in the curvature and shape of spacetime, this force, this natural phenomenon that makes the multiverse worthy of remark, that clusters and batches and bundles and bunches masses into clumps and clomps, into stomps and stamps, is what makes us, us. If not for gravity, there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no humans, no music, no chocolate. All it’s doing is claiming back that which has always belonged to it: you.

The Big Bang’s abrupt expansion of matter overpowered the powerful inward pull of gravity. But, and this is the biggest but of all imagined buts, gravity may have let The Big Bang have its day, its time and space, but within a couple of dozen billion years, it’ll Big Crunch us back into singularity. Again, a speck of zero volume crunching all the matter and space-time within our universe, including us, collapsing into a dimensionless dot. Gravity’s clenched fist. Symmetry restored. Triumphant gravity opens its fingers, again, allowing for the next Big Bang, another cosmological expansion, another universe. Not ours, but not dislike ours - again, and again, and again...

We won’t be around to see that happen, but if we are lucky enough, we will see the wrinkles take over our faces, muscles and bones slowly surrender us to a wheelchair, breathing becoming heavier, eyes and ears gradually losing their grip on the outer world.

Gravity will win, eventually. It always has. But... can humans transcend the limitations of a biological body and become immortal? And if so, who will be the first human to live forever?

Some of the gravity’s fighters on Maria’s flight will not be so lucky. Gravity’s pull on the plane will be their last battle. Gravity is a bitch. A monster. An indifferent beast, it has other plans for the flight back from The World Summit. Royalty and first class have zero importance to the first force in the multiverse.

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Impact!