With the recent celebration of man’s walk on the moon, I am reminded of the big rockets that are needed and jettisoned in order to get a small space capsule out of the earth’s gravitational force. Gravity is present everywhere. It’s force is incredibly strong. We all know it well from a young age.
But what is human gravity? What force can possibly be as strong as earth’s gravity? We have never heard of human gravity!
Human gravity is a force that starts to form early in our lives. During the years we are raised by our parents. Accumulating not only their values, love, and traditions but also having embedded in us our parents’ fears and insecurities.
While young adults we somehow feel we reach a state of weightlessness. Trying to find ourselves in adolescense and our college years. Not sure who we really are. Testing the boundaries around us. Bordering on rebellion against the things we were raised to believe and follow. It’s as if we are using one of those big rockets to help us get past the human gravity we had accumulated from our parents.
Curiously, after we finish school, something strange happens. We settle into our life. We develop our go to habits. Our daily routines become mindless in our lives. Our jobs begin to define us. Comfort and easy is what we cling to. Our worldviews become rigid. Our experiences are all we come to know. No more school. No need to learn more. Just be free and live our lives as we choose to.
Never understanding that all of these things trap us because of human gravity’s force that gets stronger over time. We never think about earth’s gravity. That is exactly why we never can see the force of our own created human gravity.
Our habits, routines, and comfort make it very hard for us to do something different. This is exactly the definition of human gravity. To change becomes more daunting once you understand the force with which you need to push against our own human gravity to get there.
Our own human gravity always holds us back while being everpresent.
That is why so few of us are able to make a different “something” lead to sustainable change. What we do differently for a week or two quickly degrades back to our old ways. Our own created human gravity, full of our habits, routines, and comfort, never lets us move on or get away.
That is why intention and lack of fear needs to be the fuel that propels us past who we are and where we have been in order for us to evolve and grow. It’s taken me 62 years of my life to begin to understand the power of our own created human gravity and the seemingly impossible force that constrains us from moving forward.
My hope is that by becoming aware of this, it may bring you a step closer towards understanding why it is so difficult for us to succesfully change aspects of our lives. For it takes so much more than simply reading a book, talking to a friend, or reading a blog.