Day 482 – Orbital Mechanics

Hours of Daylight – 14:56

Shorter and hotter is the rule for the days here this summer. Still i suppose it’s better to have the low humidity of the high desert than the sticky wool-blanket-soaked-in-mineral-oil feel of the midwest.

Eileen
Talk about a mish-mosh of thoughts, fears, and curiosity. That’s the best way i can describe the past few days. I’ve been thinking about my parents a lot lately. As you know both my parents are dead. Years now. I once wrote that their deaths, from my perspective, were best described in terms of orbital mechanics. Specifically a body in orbit around a planet will become "released" from that orbit if the central body disappears. Now before you get all mathematical i me i admit that is a simplistic analogy. There are many factors in play. But the gist is once the central object ceases to exist the orbiting body will tend to move tangentially to it’s previous orbital path. The path of the "released" object might become a much larger elipse bringing the object, in time, back to the "neighborhood." Thus despite the central body’s demise the orbiting body still has circular path and the now vacent center remains at least near the center of the orbit.

If the velocity of the body in orbit is sufficient, once released, the body will still have a left over vector from the effect of the central body, but the resultant path will be more tangential. The odds are such a body would be easily influenced by near misses with other bodies in space and never return to the original neighborhood. Flung into space would be an apt description.

We can’t escape orbital mechanics. We are all in some kind of orbit around some kind of central object. Even if the orbit is really big (think comets with a period of centuries) it’s still an orbit. The central object can be a person, it can be a place, it can even be an idea. For most what’s central is a mixture, a viscose, slippery, substance always changing at some variable rate. This idea is a comfort to me; it makes me feel very connected to the whole of visible creation. Think about it: from the very small – atoms, quarks, subatomic specks, to the very large – entire galaxies in orbit around other galaxies or the mysterious "great attractor." It’s all about motion and mass and energy. Human relationships are probably the most mutable of these myriad orbits. Many change moment to moment. Some change over decades. For many when the cental body is an idea, christianity or islam, for example, change may come slowest of all. Yet the slowest change when measured in "human" terms is still just a speck on the great cosmic calendar.

What’s my point? Not sure. I’m still working on it.