The Weight of Things

Weight changes depending on where and how you measure it. Mass remains the same, even when a body is weightless, as, for example, with an astronaut in space. There is a crucial difference between the two. When, last autumn, I was standing on the viewing platform of the Rockefeller Building in New York, had there been a set of scales handy I might have delighted in weighing less than I did down at ground level back in my hotel. The measure of my waistline hadn't changed (alas), but the force of gravity would have been slightly, but measurably, less at that height.

Gravity is a fundamental of our existence. It's what holds us in place; and by giving us weight, it also becomes a component of our human identity. It is why we are constructed and shaped the way we are. We spend our lives fighting gravity, and those who are particularly good at doing that, like great athletes, are deservedly praised. There is a sense in which the struggle against gravity becomes one of the measures of life, as witnessed in growth and movement - and, in the human story, invention.

Gravity and, alongside it, time are our lifelong prisoners; we can never entirely escape them, and in the end we succumb to them both. It is ironic, given that, that science has never fully explained either of these forces, and some scientists at least would claim that neither gravity not time really exist, it is just that from within our experience of things they seem to. But I certainly do not understand enough science to enter that argument!

But here are my thoughts, for what it's worth, as a person of faith. Is everything about me in fact fatally enslaved by gravity and time, or is there somehow more to me than just the stuff of organic life? Is the sense I claim I have of the spiritual self merely a fearful attempt to escape from the inevitable victory of gravity and time, or might there be a deeper truth about me that neither gravity nor time can master? Am I merely body, or am I both body and soul? In the end I choose to be on the side of the angels (so to speak), but I understand those of my friends who cannot join me there. Simple common-sense tells me that this world is all there is, that gravity can't be beaten, that time will in the end win, and that dust must always return to dust. But somehow it doesn't feel that that is enough, and somehow things like music and wonder and ecstasy and love remain unaccounted for in this calculation. I may well just be a victim of wishful thinking. But I am content and happy to be so.