In action vs. inaction

After more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions, I still see a surprising amount of people with no plan what so ever in terms of down time management and giving in to wasting copious amounts of time. Nature around us knows no such thing as inaction. So why should we?

Inaction can be defined as the lack of action where some is expected or appropriate.

Everything evolves, matures, grows, changes, betters, worsens, decays, accelerates & decelerates in nature. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly but nothing is ever still.

Actually, you might think that you're just reading this text. On the bus, on a train. Even if you're in a lobby or on the couch you haven't left in two days., you are still traveling an incredible distance every second you don't move.

Think about that for only one second ... BAM! You basically just moved about the distance between Paris and Lisbon :D

April 2021 Super Moon shot over Cascais, Portugal

By going through each level of motion and adding it all up at the end, you'll be surprised about how wild the ride actually is.

Let's start small and assume you are actually giving in to inaction. If we opt for a lazy Sunday freezing our ass off on one of Earth's poles, we'll actually rotate on our own axis once every day, very slowly. If we are chilling in the warm lush equator region, we're going at 1600km/hour. That's already something! We don't feel it for the same reason we don't feel stuck in our seats in cars or airplanes - speed is relative. We only feel it when it changes... like social inequalities and privileges ... :-)

On top of that, the Earth travels around the Sun, a trip of 942 millions km every year. To complete that lap within that period, a speed of 107.000 km/h is needed.

If we zoom out further, the planet is tied to the movement of the Sun. The Sun is believed to move across our Galaxy accompanied by all of its planets at a speed of  72.000 km/h.

We're also moving up relative to the galactic disc at about 35.000 km/h. No worries though, we're not going to fly out of the Galaxy. The gravity of millions and millions of stars is going to slow us down and pull us back in ... within the next 14 million years. We've got time to talk about that in one of our next posts ^^

Since we're about half the distance between the center and the edge of the Milky Way and, according to scientists, the Galaxy rotates once every 200 - 250 millions of years and we're moving at about 885.000 km/h as a solar system.

We, the planet, the solar system - everything is moving and so is the whole Galaxy. We're headed towards the Andromeda Galaxy (collision alert in about 4.5 billions of years - we'll also find time to cover that one in another post) at more than 400.000 km/h. Ultimately, this whole mess is buzzing towards Virgo at about 1 million km/h and towards Hydra at double that speed.

So overall, the Milky Way might be moving at something like 3.6 million km/h.

Even more mind bending, the further away we get from our point of observation, the more difficult it gets to measure our actual speed. While we move a little bit on our 1-hour commute to work, the Galaxy is moving 3.6 million km. The reason we use constellation and galaxies to mesure this is the same reason humans have always used trees, hills or big rocks to gage approximate distances on Earth. They're large 'objets' - human mental constructs, actually - and far enough away that they become a point of reference. We can measure our speed relative to theirs but, of course and unlike the mountains and the trees, all of those stars and galaxies are also moving at mind-bending speeds. Andromeda is moving, the stars of the constellation Hydra (one of the constellations we measure against) are moving ... everything is moving !!! The whole Universe might also be moving relative to ... something else beyond. Why not?

So, your speed at the equator plus the speed of Earth around the Sun plus the solar systems speed through the Galaxy plus the speed of the Milky Way equals about 4.5 million km/h (1300km/s).

How is that supposed to make us feel? Small, insignificant? Awesome, super-amazing? Actually, it's ok if it makes us feel strictly nothing. The point is that none of us is tucked in panic to his chair while reading this because we're all in this together: the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the mountains, the trees, the corporations, the office chair. It's not because some stars or planets move faster than others that they can escape the Universe. Just like we're all together in the societies we build. Some of us are more privileged relative to others but ultimately, we are all on the same boat - for real.

Why go against our nature? Why give in to inaction? Why not speak out more for what makes us stand together? Why not take back the power over our time management and keep moving in conscious ways? There's no such thing as being left behind and giving up is not an option. Spiritual and political leaders keep using the phrase over and over again but it is more than a slogan. We're genuinely all in this together. All & everything.

Making the best out of it and chasing our dreams and goals, is probably the only sensible thing to do no matter how twisted it seems to others. They say that the things one regrets most, are those that were never tried - not the ones experimented that went wrong.

We are incredibly lucky to be what, who and where we are because nobody in all of the Universe history has ever been like us and no one will ever be again.​