9.8 meters per seconds squared

Throw a ball as hard as you can and at some point, it will fall. Achieve any sort of flight in your life, and plight will happen. Just as a 25-year-old professional baseball player will throw a ball harder – and keep the ball in the air longer - than a 15-year-old baseball player, a more talented and experienced person will sustain their success more than the inept and youthful.

Gravity is what they call it. The inevitable law of nature that people tend to take for granted, gravity is that force that is the implicit bane of our existence. Without gravity, we wouldn’t die after airplane crashes because, there would be no crash. Bridges wouldn’t collapse because there would be no collapse in gravity’s absence. For that matter, busting our hips on a fall, curveballs, and jumpshots would be nonexistent sans gravity.

What are we as humans more afraid of, ascension or plummeting? Without a doubt, it is the fall that we dread. Gravity.

Pay attention to the laws of nature. They offer stark parallels to our day-to-day goings. Everybody wants success, the money the glitter, the recognition, whatever. Everybody wants it. But who wants to fall? The answer to that question aids in our understanding of the psychology of the dormant in our society. You know, the individuals who sit idly waiting for something to happen. Lack of moxie, they call it.

People need encouragement, true. But most of all, people need toughness. When buildings are built, a solid foundation is set before a level is added. That stability provides the toughness if you will, that sturdiness that keeps the building afloat amidst the external forces that comes to test its mettle.

Weak bricks and structure erodes from the constant pressure of precipitable forces. Weak people whittle away from similar forces. What does this have to do with gravity, you say?

We are all forced to adjust to gravity because we know that there is no way around that. Either you recognize it, or you will fall prey to its adverse effects. But we have no problem doing that. When is the last time you heard somebody say, “I wish that we didn’t have this damn gravity here, otherwise, I wouldn’t have dropped that table on my toe”?

But how many complaints have you heard about the weather, or any other factor that we cannot control? They have even figured out a formula for gravity and made laws for its understanding. But becoming tougher and less irritable about other immutable forces eludes us.

Take a lesson from Sir Isaac, and apply it to the bigger point: learn the laws and adapt, instead of trying to change the unchangeable. Acknowledge the laws of gravity. It will make you stronger…in more ways than naught.

-IV