Gravity + Decisions
“Gravity is not a trivial monster.”
Have you ever noticed the language we use for decisions or experiences that we feel mean a lot to us?
We call them weighty.
We say this matters.
We talk about the gravity of our choices.
Isn’t that so interesting?
Because, okay, first of all, what actually *is* gravity again?
And, what does it have to do with our sense of meaning or importance?
Are we implying that some experiences have more or less *gravity* than others?
And, how exactly do we decipher which experiences have more or less of it?
I love this. What fun questions.
So, let’s start with gravity.
Gravity is a force that acts between any two objects with mass.
And mass is the amount of matter which each of those bodies contain.
And matter is typically defined as a physical substance of some kind.
If matter is something physical, then it is something that takes up space and time. It weighs something.
Interestingly, the more matter an object has the more space and time bend around it.
Light helps us observe this phenomenon. When the gravitational field—space and time—are bent around massive objects, light flows around the curvature of that bend. More mass? More curvature. More curvature? The more time slows down.
What do humans feel when time seems to slow down?
A sense of presence.
A weight to our lives.
Like everything matters.
Like it’s all kind of sacred.
We feel more connected to ourselves, to others, to life.
This is where gravity again connects to the “erotic.”
This is where matter isn’t just physical, but spiritual.
Here’s one example:
Your local farm that uses regenerative agriculture to raise its animals and rebuild the soil? They’re working in the material world by treating their land and their livestock with care, yes. But, they’re also working in the ethereal, spiritual world, because they’re giving proper weight to their choices. They acknowledge the gravity and meaning in deciding to bring us and themselves into greater connection to—into greater presence, intimacy, and community with—their work and with the people who are nourished by that work.
I would argue, then, that their food makes us more alive than other food.
Y’all. Are you getting this?
Dis-ease isn’t just an odd thing that happens when our cellular defenses go awry after we eat enough shitty food. Dis-ease is what happens when we aren’t in deep, present connection with all of life and our choices. And shitty food isn’t just something with lots of calories or covered in pesticides. Shitty food makes us sick physically because it wasn’t given proper alignment spiritually. It wasn’t given its proper weight, gravity, connection, and purpose in the first place. Pesticides, then, are a type of spiritual disconnection.
Our choices, including where we get our food or what work we decide to do in the world, aren’t just about making us “good” or “bad” people. It’s not just that creating your art, or living out whatever you feel is your purpose, or surrounding yourself with genuine community gives you an emotional boost. It’s not even just some kind of spiritual quest for enlightenment to choose things that are “better” for us and the planet.
It's also that those choices literally bring us more life—expanding our time—or they bring us more death—constricting our time. Not just perceptually and metaphorically, but physically. If shitty food gives us disease, we die. And, after all, isn't death just the ultimate and final constriction of our perception of time?
So we are made either more or less alive based on the meaning, the matter, the significance, the connection, the intimacy of our choices, and the GRAVITY of our decisions.
In case I need to be even more concrete:
I am arguing not only that all matter is spiritual.
But that all matter is alive.
So I’m saying that all matter, then, brings us more or less alive.
Things we can touch, feel, taste, etc.
But also our less tangible “matters”—our work, our friendships, etc.
Which means that these choices affect us both spiritually and physically.
Actually, what I’m saying here is that the spiritual and the physical are one-and-the-same.
We become physically sick when our choices are out of spiritual alignment. And we become spiritually sick when our physical choices aren't aligned with our deepest knowing.
But if the inverse is also true, then we can each not only bend time and space, giving us all a feeling of more purpose, aliveness, and presence, but heal ourselves and each other by giving our choices the proper weight they deserve. We can quite literally heal each other by living lives of meaning and purpose and connection.
Any decisions that don’t bring you and your community more alive will inherently cause you not just a material (physical) kind of death (disease, depression, anxiety, etc.), but a spiritual death, too—an annoyingly persistent feeling like your life hasn’t had as much purpose as you know it should. Like you haven’t been present here at all.
We will be made well when we each acknowledge that our sense of time, our sense of presence, is deeply connected to our physical health.
Staying at that job or in that relationship that's killing your soul?
Guess what, friends.
It might literally be killing you.
Because it says something about the "weight" you give to your time here. To your life. But if you start choosing aliveness more and more often, you could very well keep yourself and others from being so damn sick.
In this way, you and the regenerative farm are the same.
Look at your life and your work as a type of nourishment you offer, and you'll see that what you're here to give the world feeds you and others.
And we might all die without it.
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