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.

475 Posts and Counting...

Congratulations to me. This is my 475th post on MarathonMum.

When I started this blog five and a half years ago, blogging was still in its infancy. People have moved on now to Twitter and Facebook-- as have I, to a certain extent-- but I keep plodding on with the blog.

Why?

First of all, I like doing it. It gives me a chance to write about anything I like. I don't always come up with interesting essays, and often the posts feature pictures of Thing One and Two (though the grandparents like these posts). But I very much enjoy putting stuff out there. I may only have a few dozen regular readers, but that doesn't bother me *that* much. If I really cared about getting more followers, I would have made this a more general blog, guaranteeing more strangers reading the things I write.

I also might have more followers if I posted more regularly, but I tend to go in fits and spurts. Last year was a terrible year for productivity, but I was holding down another job as well as doing all the other things that moms have to do, so time was tight. Even when I was getting up regularly at 5:30 a.m. to get work done, the blog suffered.

Productivity also can be hampered by the fact that blogging is bloody hard work, as evidenced by the dead blogs scattered throughout the Information Superhighway. (MarathonMom, the original name I wanted to name this blog, I'm looking at you). There's also loads of people who say, "Oh, I'm going to do a blog," and then they abandon it. (Laurel Touby, take a bow. Scroll down for the apology for not blogging more.)

Another reason I keep plodding on is that it's serving as a really nice journal of our family life. Occasionally, I'll go back a few years to see what we were doing then, and I'll stumble across a photo of Thing One or Thing Two that will literally take my breath away, because they're so small-cute-different from how they are now.

But the best reason I can think of persevering is that it's keeping me writing. As I continue to toil on my first novel, it's a nice break to be able to just jump on to the blog and write whatever is in my head. Sometimes these thoughts are worth reading, sometimes they're not. But I do appreciate you stopping by, whoever you are.

Thanks for reading.

Some Wow Words from the New York Times

The New York Times, one of my favourite papers in the world and one for whom I proudly worked (very briefly, in both time and content) published a list the other day of the words that most frequently stumped its readers. I found this list both life affirming and humbling, based on the words I use frequently, and the words I had to look up. I've provided a definition of the first 10 on the list, but I'm not going to tell you which ones I had to look up, and which ones I knew already.

The NY Times was able to compile this list because of an incredibly cool feature on NYTimes.com, which I only just learned about. If you're reading a story online and are stumped by a particular word, if you double click it, a question mark will appear. If you then click on the question mark, it will give you the definition.

This list also reminds me of an incredibly vexing school assignment that my brother was given when he was in 7th grade. He was given a list with various Wow Words (though they didn't call it that). My parents took one look at the list and said, "Let's call Grandpa. He reads the New York Times every day. He's bound to find these words." I was able to find one word-- placid-- in a book I was reading at the time, but my contribution was immediately rejected by everyone because it came from a "Girl's Book."

So without further delay, here's some new words for you to add to your vocabulary. Drop them into a sentence at your next party to impress your friends!

Most Frequently Looked-up Words on NYTimes.com, 2010

Date Range: 1/1/2010 through 5/26/2010

1 inchoate (definition: undeveloped)

2 profligacy (definition: recklessly extravagent)

3 sui generis (definition: unique)

4 austerity (definition: The 2008-2010 Recession Aftermath. Kidding!)

5 profligate (definition: the adjective version of the noun found in No. 2)

6 baldenfreude (Fake Word, so don't bother getting out your dictionary)

7 opprobrium (definition: state of being abused)

8 apostates (definition: person who has abandoned religion, cause or political party)

9 solipsistic (definition: theory that only the self is the only thing that can be verified)

10 obduracy (definition: obstinate)

11 Internecine

12 soporific

13 Kristallnacht

14 peripatetic

15 nascent

16 desultory

17 redoubtable

18 hubris

19 mirabile dictu

20 crèches

21 apoplectic

22 overhaul

23 ersatz

24 obstreperous

25 jejune

26 omertà

27 putative

28 Manichean

29 canard

30 ubiquitous

31 atavistic

32 renminbi

33 sanguine

34 antediluvian

35 cynosure

36 alacrity

37 epistemic

38 egregious

39 incendiary

40 chimera

41 laconic

42 polemicist

43 comity

44 provenance

45 sclerotic

46 prescient

47 hegemony

48 verisimilitude

49 feckless

50 démarche

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.)