Your new trip around the sun
A few days into the new year, a friend greeted me this way:
“I hope you enjoyed these first days of your new trip around the sun.”
That’s a slightly different way to say “Happy New Year”. I like it.
It’s also a phrase that adds perspective.
Which is needed. Because frankly, we wish everybody a “Happy New Year” and then just a few days later everything is the same old routine and you couldn’t tell that there’s anything new or different about the year. Unless of course you look at a calendar and see that it’s January. Even then, those little squares and numbers marking the days quickly blend together.
But that image of a new trip around the sun is like a giant zoom-out to a wider-than-cinemascope format. A very different perspective.
We usually think of the world — the Earth — as stable. Solid. Firm. We ignore that it rotates around its axis every day at a blistering speed.
We also definitely ignore that the entire Earth is hurtling through space in a mostly circular path around the sun. This too at a speed so high we have nothing to compare with.
Somewhere on that Earth. Are we. You and me and everyone else.
