A year ago I planned that I would close my practice this week. I announced my decision to the people I worked with, and I slowly, slowly worked my way through the year. And, just like everything else that is set for a designated time in the future, it came to pass. I had planned for this to happen on the solstice; that seemed somehow to make it all be a part of the natural flow of things.
So, this evening, I took a slow walk at a few minutes after eight, waiting for 8:23, which was the official time that the sun would set on this, the longest day of the year. It was a beautiful day here in Southern New England. The temperature was in the mid-seventies, the sky had few big white clouds, the air was clear, the greens of the mid-June flowers, grasses and tress were all bright and fresh and came in a dozen different hues.
The sunset did not disappoint. The sky turned a darker shade of blue, the clouds turned to pink, rimed with silver. The sun was going down on the longest day of the year, and also on the longest stretch of my career.
Except of course, the sun isn't really going down. As you know, it just the earth, still turning on it's axis, and right then our part of New England has turned away from the sun and is entering into the shadows. The days are all almost exactly the same length, down to the micro-second. Today it was just that we got more sunlight than on any other day of the year. The earth continues to circle the sun; well, it's really an ellipse. The sun continues to move around the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving in a gravitational dance with the other galaxies in our cluster.
To most of us on earth it really doesn't feel that way. It really feels as if the sun rises in the morning, gets pulled across the sky by a chariot, and then sets over on the other side of the neighborhood. That's the way it is with a lot of things: they feel like they're something meaningful, metaphorical, and magical -- but they're not, it's really just the same stuff happening over and over. It's really just physics.
Just like me closing my practice. But that's not physics as much as it's biology. I'm getting older and I don't want to do that any more.
2 comments:
Your post reminds me of my favorite Richard Feynman story. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist said to a group of very orthodox rabbis, "Good news! An electric light is not a fire." He was speaking to the prohibition against lighting fires on the Sabbath, which meant no cooking, no turning on lights. He went on to give a lengthy and scientific explanation as to why an electric light is not a fire. After he finished, the rabbis looked at one another and said, "It's a fire."
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