Is Gravity Responsible for Falling in Love?*

Is gravity responsible for falling in love?

Are you kidding me? Of course not. Gravity is science. It is certain. It can be seen. It can be proven. It is indubitable. It can even be expressed by a scientific formula, in this case F=G([m1*m2]/D^2). (Thanks Sir Isaac Newton!)

Love—falling in, being in, staying in, or any other gerund related to its action—is anything but scientific. It’s kismet. It’s fate. It’s chance. It’s luck. It’s unproven. It’s a type of alchemy. It is the very antithesis of science.

But hang on a second. Could it be that simple? Is life really that clear cut? No, it’s not. Things are never just black or white, yes or no. There are usually lots of shades of grey, and there’s always at least one maybe.

Sir Isaac Newton, after all, wasn’t just a scientist. He was also a philosopher, a professor, a politician and a mathematician. He was Master of the Mint. (I don’t know what that means, but I bet it looked pretty cool on his calling cards.) You could say he was a jack-of-all-trades. Or you could say that he was neither one thing nor another. He lived his life in glorious shades of grey. He did, after all, have a surfeit of grey matter.

Is the Law of Universal Gravitation physics or is it mathematics? Both camps want to claim it as their own. It appears to be neither one nor the other: another great shade of grey.

Sir Isaac was a man of many talents, and also a man of many laws of physics. In addition to his Law of Gravity, he also wrote three laws of motion. The second and third laws explain force and action, but it is the first law where he may have been obliquely referring to love. The first law of motion states that an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion, unless hit by something else.

So a person not in love will stay that way, but a person in love stays in love, unless hit by something (like fancying someone new). Maybe he wasn’t thinking about love when he wrote the First Law of Motion, but it certainly does seem to apply.

Would Sir Isaac still have come up with the same Law of Gravity if he had been able to apply it to falling in love rather than falling apple? Sir Isaac never married, and the encyclopedias don’t tell us if he ever fell in love. Falling in love, as applied to the scientific principal of gravity, certainly seems to be a shade of grey.

But if love, rather than an apple had inspired Sir Isaac Newton, could he have proven that gravity was responsible for falling in love? We shall never know.

* I wrote this essay as part of an application for a one-day writing course. (I was accepted.) They didn't seem to use it for anything, so I thought rather than let it sit on my hard drive unused, I would post it here.

Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 15*

To my 15-year-old self:

Please listen to this advice . I know some of it sounds crazy, but I know what I’m talking about here. You’ll thank me later.

• Don’t believe your hairdresser when she tells you that a perm would be a good idea. It’s not.

• In two years, a company called Microsoft will have its IPO, with shares selling at $21. Buy some.

• Grandma is right when she says you ought to have a Plan B for both boyfriends and life. This advice will serve you well.

• You may think these are the best days of your life, but they’re not. (But they are the best days of the star quarterback’s life. He becomes an appliance salesman.)

• Wear a bikini every day. Even in snow.

• You think you know everything. Trust me, you don’t. And believe me about the bikini.

You’re welcome.

*This is my winning entry in a recent writing competition sponsored by Spread the Word, a U.K. writing organisation, where I recently attended a workshop. I was limited to only 150 words, thus the short length. If I had to write down everything I didn't know at 15, it would be a VERY long list. The prize was a gold chocolate bunny (much happiness from the family), and a book, "How to be an Artist" (must happiness from me). I hope you like it.

Precious Things

Behind a non-descript door in the basement of our 200-year-old house sits a big black Victorian safe.

There’s only one problem with this big black safe: It can’t hold any of my precious things.

Mechanically, the safe works perfectly. Multiple keys, which we have, are needed to lock its many compartments and thick door. The heavy door, which could easily amputate a finger, is impressive. Inside the safe, there are several different-sized compartments and drawers in which to hold valuables.

So while the safe can easily store valuables, even though it sits empty, it can’t hold the thing I deem the most precious in my life: the good health of me and my family.

The importance of that simple thing—good health—came into sharp relief for me last November when I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis. I was only 37 years old.

It was a long and painful road to that diagnosis, involving five doctors, four X-rays, one MRI and countless consultations during most of 2006. In the end, the correct diagnosis came from Google, the Internet search engine. I decided to try a consultation with Google after a medical study showed it was excellent resource to figure out hard to diagnose problems. Dr. Google came up trumps, later confirmed by two doctors.

Up until then, I took my own good health for granted most of the time. Why did I need to worry? I was in my 30s, I completed the London Marathon in 2005 and the only times I ever stayed in a hospital were when my sons were born. I never seriously thought I’d have to worry about the preciousness of my own good health.

My father, an eternal optimist, is fond of saying, “At least we have our health,” when things don’t go according to plan. In our family, that was always the fallback statement to make us feel better when things went wrong. When my father was made redundant, we said it. When I didn’t gain acceptance to the university of my dreams, we said it. When my brother got divorced, we said it.

But there have been times when the statement was no comfort at all. When my father was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was 48, we couldn’t say it. When my brother was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer when he was 40, we couldn’t say it. When I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was 37, I couldn’t say it. Our good health was the one thing we could always depend on when things went wrong. But once we couldn’t say, “At least we have our health,” we painfully understood how important and precious it was.

Last week, just as I was going to step into the shower, my mother called and said she had some news. As I could sense this was going to be a long call, and I was clothed only in a towel next to our front window on a busy street, I told her I would call her back.

By the time I did return her call, I had spent the previous 15 minutes pondering what the news could be. I worried that it could be news of a recurrence of my brother’s cancer. I worried that it could be news that the medical tests she just took revealed an undiagnosed serious problem. In short, I worried that the news was really horrible.

“We had a flood,” she told me, when I called back.

My first reaction was relief, but she was quite upset. A confluence of meteorological events meant the ground around my parent’s house got completely waterlogged, which led to more than 18 inches of water in their basement at the end of two days.

They lost many things that seemed precious but really weren’t: old records people hadn’t listened to in decades, boxes of my childhood schoolwork, love letters from my high school boyfriend. What broke my mother’s heart was the loss of hundreds of pictures, documenting our family’s history, and what she considered to be most valuable.

“But at the end of the day, it’s just stuff,” I told her. “It’s sad to lose it, but I was imagining news much worse than that.”

For good measure, I added, “At least you have your health.”

Because, like all precious things, good health is something you take for granted only until you lose it.


Editor's Note: There are many things I wanted to write about-- the Cutty Sark fire, our trip to Italy, the return of my running routine, but I'm short on time. Instead, I pasted above an essay I wrote for the Arthritis Care foundation for its writing competition. The only requirement to enter the contest was to have arthritis. The theme was "Precious Things."
"Result!" I thought. "Finally a perk of having arthritis. I've got it AND I can write. I"ll win for sure." As it happens, I didn't win, but I got a nice letter from them today saying that I was on the final shortlist, which makes me happy (though it would have been better if I'd won.)