Why do we stay where we stay?

While walking through the grocery store yesterday, I found myself wondering when the patrons first moved to the area and why they’ve been there for the time that they have.

In physics there’s this concept of gravitational pull that describes an invisible force, gravity, that attracts objects of mass toward each other.

It’s what keeps us planted.

Connections, jobs, familiarity, habit, routine — all of these things comprise a kind of gravity that holds us in place.

Gravity in this sense plays a dichotomous role in our lives. If we like where we are at, we owe it to all these things that pull us into place. If we don’t, we also owe it to these very same things.

In order to break free from the gravitational pull, you need to achieve something called escape velocity — the minimum speed necessary in order to do so.

I think the more radical the change, the more likely we are to achieve it. Maybe this is why some people make spontaneously move, suddenly end connections, or suddenly seek new ones.

Some food for introspection.

If you don’t like where you are planted, the maybe the best way out — the best way to potentiate a new home — is to summon an enormous amount of speed in the form of major choices about your environment or your connections such that what you are doing now is completely unrecognizable from what you were doing before.