Momentum, Gravity, and Lessons from Baba Amte

“Orbit” in Ultramarine Blue, Navy, Vanilla, and Linda’s Sunset (21” x 17”)

On fear

“It *does* feel scary,” agreed bear.

“Perhaps,” she continued, “it needs a hug?”

Thoughts while making…

We circle, you and I, around and around.

Turning in the dark, spinning in the light.

Our paths never crossing, yet we are always connected.

Sometimes we come so close, only to slip through open fingers – an endless cycle, perigee and apogee.

Momentum and gravity keep us together, and also keep us apart.

Baba Amte was born in 1914 to a wealthy Brahmin family in Maharashtra, India. As a young man, he met a leper. And the encounter is said to have filled him with fear.

Yet rather than circling that fear like some distant moon, he overcame inertia and pulled it close. And closer still.

And in so doing, he changed history (go read about him and the amazing work he did as an advocate for the treatment and de-stigmatization of leprosy).

Newton’s first law of motion states an object in motion will stay in motion unless something pushes or pulls on it.

This is true of orbits, where a balance between momentum and gravity is required to keep both connection + distance between two objects.

This is also true of fear. Of whatever your fears may be; those that tie, those that bind. Connecting us to that which is named and unnamed, imagined and believed.

Yet what might happen if, instead of keeping them out there, distant, you pulled your fears toward you, closer and closer still?

Letting them, as it were, crash into you – like a satellite being pulled into your atmosphere, disintegrating in a brilliant burst of light and energy upon impact.

As Baba said, “Once you are in the orbit of your destiny, weightlessness is the only result.”

Cool, right?

What might happen if you decided to intersect the path of your greatest fear?