Universal Gravitation and Empathy

It’s a cliche I’ve heard dozens of times in the past several months and the theme of this week’s article: “it’s a crazy world out there.” With an ever-lingering air of chaos and tragedy, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that ‘we,’ as a human race are all interconnected and should continue to live empathetically and compassionately.

I wrote down a beautiful block-quote from Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time” that to me, rethinks the idea of interconnectedness by looking at it through a scientific theory: “Newton postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other.” In that sense, a “force stronger” than the masses is gravity, but if thought about through the idea of human interconnectedness, could stand for something more metaphysical like empathy or sympathy.

So through gravity, the entire universe, each mass, each body is attracted to one another and is connected by a pull that makes the masses with “no obvious connection...numerically equal” (Newton’s Law of Gravitation); and equality is truly what should be at the forefront of living.

Beyond religion, race, political beliefs, gender or culture, we must understand and act on the fact that we are all equal beings. Empathy, human emotions and communication are what truly connect us-- and those are what we must focus on as we go forward.

Through gravity, every mass is attracted to each other-- through empathy, every mass is connected to each other. The issue is simple, when we address other people as problems or competition, something to act upon not interact with, we lose sight of the fact that we are all the same.

Earth remains in orbit because of the sun's gravitational pull on it. We remain on the earth's surface because of its gravitational pull on us. And we remain together because of our empathetical pull on each other.

Stay conscious that we are all on this orbiting sphere, together. And together, we shall continue to live compassionately, interact, communicate and educate our fellow beings.