Saturn

I was just old enough to realize that the world does not revolve around me, but still young enough to imagine, to believe that the impossible could be.

I sat in the car and watched the white lines rush toward the hood and shoot out the back window. The highway looked so much like the belt of a treadmill that it seemed possible that just might be how it worked. What if the wheels spinning did not propel the car forward, but pulled the ground backward?

I already knew that the earth was a big spinning ball. And turning a key and pressing a pedal therefore causing tires to spin, which somehow caused the immensely heavy car to move forward seemed just as ridiculous as the tires helping the earth spin a little bit more. From my position in the car it seemed as if the car was the only thing that was not moving.

I knew that to the people standing by the side of the road it looked like the car was moving. But people are used to standing on a spinning earth, so why would anyone notice that the ground was moving backwards because of the car?

The greatest blow to my Theory of the Treadmill Earth was the problem of all the other vehicles on the road going different speeds. I realized that if all of the cars pulled their own section of ground back at different speeds then the ground would tear like a big napkin. I postulated that maybe one car did all of the pulling and the other cars just rolled along without much effort. But how could one determine which car was actually doing the pulling? It would probably have to be the fastest car. The fastest car gets the treadmill going and the others just try to keep up.

But then I realized that this would mean that the slower cars were actually being moved forward by their wheels. And from my perspective the car would either be going forward or pulling the earth backward depending on whether or not it was the fastest car. My theory was not internally consistent. I believed my mind’s invention for a minute, but then I realized that it was wrong so I scrapped it.

I sometimes still want the world to revolve around me. I wonder if maybe somehow it revolves around each individual person.

Maybe every person has their own world; a distinct set of combinations of friends, experiences, thoughts and perceptions unique from anyone else. Maybe at each moment each person’s world has a sun that it revolves around.

In a delivery room worlds revolve around a woman. The husband’s planet rotates and revolves a little faster than the rest. A moment later every world, including the mother’s, revolves around a crying sun, and the planet called husband is renamed daddy. At a wedding the bride and groom are the sun. I remember a night a few months ago when stones were hurtling around Marcos and 2 hours and two thousand dollars later we were relieved that he would be at school another semester and nothing else mattered.

I’m still young enough to believe in what could be. I want to understand and explain things that are beyond my reach. But I’ll keep making up theories, and testing them. I hold on to what makes sense and even to what doesn’t. Sit back and soak in the wonder of mystery and miracle.