Just Call Me Copernicus

It is tough, even painful, to make a discovery that goes against everything you thought you knew. Right now, I am dealing with the pain of such a discovery.

When you are a child, everything seems to center around you. Your parents and everyone you meet, seem to be there to serve you. You see the sun out the window of your care, and it appears to be following you. At a certain point you grow up, or at the least are supposed to.

Belatedly, I am discovering that the world does not revolve around me. Copernicus convinced the world that the universe was heliocentric, moving the belief of the people away from the belief that everything revolved around the sun. Some would say he moved people away from a theocentric belief, that G-d was at the center of the universe. I am struggling to move away from a ME-ocentric universe.

As I sit here in a year of mourning, I struggle with the fact that the world goes on its way as if everything is normal. How can the sun shine when I feel so gloomy? How can it be that people do not answer to my kaddish prayer, with the same passion that I recite it?
Before, I went out to meet up with a group for a run. There was a car accident, along the way that made me late. How could this happen to me? Never mind the people who were in the accident. Clearly this was about me. How could the people in the group not wait for me? Never mind that no one had any idea I was going to be there. They still should have waited.

My response was to go for a group run by myself, running much harder than I should have been on an “easy” running day. I didn’t care. I wanted to run my anger and self-pity into the ground. Still, like the sun from my youth, I could not get rid of them, as they accompanied me every step.

I am alone in my orbit, a small star at best, with a minimal gravitational pull. I will see where this new reality brings me.

PLEASE donate in my mom’s memory to help children with cancer:
http://www.teamlifeline.org/mypage.php?myid=56579