The Weight of Time and Place – Hokus Grey
Our past has weight. It’s heavy. Not like a rock we carry around, but dense like a star. Our past has gravity. It doesn’t just pull us backwards. It distorts our view of the present, as well as the future. We get so used to the gravity holding us back, that we think there are no other ways to exist, but that truth is a lie. If you weight 175lbs on Earth, your weight would be only 66lbs on Mars, or 25lbs on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. On the surface of the Sun, you would weigh almost 4800lbs. On a neutron star, 24,640,000,000,000lbs. Anyway, the point is that something that we identify concretely with who we are, in this case our body mass, is relative depending on where we are in the universe. And what is body mass but the effect of gravity on the matter that makes up our physical form. So, like gravity, our past can have a differing pull on us, a different effect on us, in our relationship to it.
Traumatic events, memories of shame, or hurt, or despair, can have a greater mass, a greater pull than others. The closer we are to them the more we can feel they are crushing us under the weight of our own existence. This is why we have to realize that we have the ability to break free of their pull. We are not subject to the pull of one body, or one memory. We can choose to create distance between our past and our present, and the more we do this, the clearer our future becomes.
I’m probably murdering this metaphor at this point and any astrophysicist worth their salt would probably groan to read this, but I think the basis of the piece is fairly solid. We view everything through the lens of our experience and the more powerful the experience, the greater the effect it has on how we see the world, and how we see ourselves. This bias is not positive, nor is it negative, it just is. In order for it to be overcome, we first must come to grips with our bias and then be willing to let it go. We are not the things that happen to us. We are not our body mass. Sure, these things will change how we view the world, but with action, we can change these things. We can make new memories that free us.
We are anti-gravity machines.
I hope you enjoyed reading the piece, “Weight of Time and Place” as much as I did.
If you like it, tell me what you think in the comments.
Be safe.
Be well.
Much Love.
-DJR
