Life in Motion

I was driving in traffic today, running errands, when all of a sudden, the thought hit me: Is this all there is to my life? Just this constant motion — walking, driving, typing?

I didn’t have so much trouble dealing with the seeming foolishness of daily living when my life mate/soul mate was with me, but now that he is dead, so often it seems as if despite all the motion, I am simply running in place.

And yet, even if I am sitting still, going nowhere, everything is in constant motion.

It’s windy, and so the air is moving at about 20 per hour. The earth is also moving, of course, spinning on its axis at about 1000 miles per hour and it is hurtling around the sun at 67,000 mph. The sun is racing around the Milky Way Galaxy at 483,000 mph. And the galaxy is moving at perhaps 2,237,000 mph. The entire universe is also moving and expanding, at untold speeds.

And that’s not all. The very atoms of our bodies are constantly moving, creating and recreating themselves and us in the process. Thoughts are pinging around in our heads, sometimes faster than we can catch them, light is traveling at 186,202 miles per second, and sound is traveling at approximately 768 miles per hour in dry air.

All that motion. Constant motion. And for what? Just to be in motion? Is that all there is to life? Motion?

All this speed is wearing me out. I think I’ll go take a nap.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook