Finding the centers of our lives is an ongoing process. We all change, and any specific point might, like Vega and Polaris vying for claim as “North Pole Star” over thousands of years, move off center for some time before returning to its former position. Our centers vary in kind, also. We have centers of place, of attitude, and of thought, the last including both our personal theologies and philosophies.
Centers change because we don’t live symmetrical lives. There are just too many unpredictable influences impinging on our daily existence that prevent a simple balloon-like expansion from our earlier selves. Successes and failures, celebrations and tragedies, and gained and lost skills all contribute to shifts in whatever centers our lives. We also accidentally or purposefully discover information that changes our knowledge of what was once central to our being.
See whether or not we can make this more specific. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as astronomers were making measurements of the celestial objects, one Dr. Maedler, the Director of the Dorpat Observatory in Russia, claimed that the “center” of the universe around which the heavens revolved was the star cluster Pleiades and its central star Alcyene (now Alcyone). We can’t fault Maedler for either suggesting that the star cluster was stationary or measuring its distance inaccurately (537 LY v. the current 440 LY). Scientific astronomy as we know it has progressed through both theory and instruments. We know the Pleiades to be young stars and masses of gas, and we know Alcyone to be a very bright, blue giant sun about ten times the size of good old Sol and more than 2,000 times brighter. It also has companions not visible without high magnification. One can see some sense in Maedler’s mistake in choosing Alcyene as a center. It was bright and central to the “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades, but he studied the heavens long before Edwin Hubble discovered the nature of galaxies and our place in the Milky Way.
We all identify centers around which we revolve. In some instances, we claim a surety that reveals our incomplete knowledge. New knowledge shakes the surety and alters the center. In other instances, we claim a surety that we refuse to reexamine in the face of discovery.
Some of us—maybe all of us—perceive any movement away from a well-established center to be a threat to our personal identity. Some of us—probably not all of us—welcome shifts because we acknowledge them as refinements of personal and universal “truths.” Dr. Maedler would probably be astonished at the information we now have about the heavens and the nature of an acentric universe filled with binary and ternary star systems. He might react the way people reacted to the overturning of the heliocentric universe of Ptolemy by Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno hundreds of years ago. Or he might take an enlightened view that welcomes discovery.
Although we sometimes balk at change, with open minds we come to recognize much of our knowledge is incomplete and that the “centers” of our personal universes are subject to change. But changing centers do not need to threaten our sense of security. As the COBE and WMAP satellites confirm and Inflation Theory describes, the universe began as a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. It began as a point smaller than what we can imagine and expanded in the so-called Big Bang. At the beginning, all the universe was in the “center.” You were in the center. You are, in fact, the center of the universe—as I am and as is everyone.
Take some consolation that there is that unchanging fact: You are your own center. The only way for it to shift, to change, is for you to discover something about yourself you never knew. That can only happen if you find new means to take the measure of yourself and those other “centers” you have chosen and then altered. Just remember Dr. Maedler’s choice of bright Alcyone as an immovable center: The brightest object on which you rest your attention and center your life might not be what you believe it is.
Centers change because we don’t live symmetrical lives. There are just too many unpredictable influences impinging on our daily existence that prevent a simple balloon-like expansion from our earlier selves. Successes and failures, celebrations and tragedies, and gained and lost skills all contribute to shifts in whatever centers our lives. We also accidentally or purposefully discover information that changes our knowledge of what was once central to our being.
See whether or not we can make this more specific. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as astronomers were making measurements of the celestial objects, one Dr. Maedler, the Director of the Dorpat Observatory in Russia, claimed that the “center” of the universe around which the heavens revolved was the star cluster Pleiades and its central star Alcyene (now Alcyone). We can’t fault Maedler for either suggesting that the star cluster was stationary or measuring its distance inaccurately (537 LY v. the current 440 LY). Scientific astronomy as we know it has progressed through both theory and instruments. We know the Pleiades to be young stars and masses of gas, and we know Alcyone to be a very bright, blue giant sun about ten times the size of good old Sol and more than 2,000 times brighter. It also has companions not visible without high magnification. One can see some sense in Maedler’s mistake in choosing Alcyene as a center. It was bright and central to the “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades, but he studied the heavens long before Edwin Hubble discovered the nature of galaxies and our place in the Milky Way.
We all identify centers around which we revolve. In some instances, we claim a surety that reveals our incomplete knowledge. New knowledge shakes the surety and alters the center. In other instances, we claim a surety that we refuse to reexamine in the face of discovery.
Some of us—maybe all of us—perceive any movement away from a well-established center to be a threat to our personal identity. Some of us—probably not all of us—welcome shifts because we acknowledge them as refinements of personal and universal “truths.” Dr. Maedler would probably be astonished at the information we now have about the heavens and the nature of an acentric universe filled with binary and ternary star systems. He might react the way people reacted to the overturning of the heliocentric universe of Ptolemy by Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno hundreds of years ago. Or he might take an enlightened view that welcomes discovery.
Although we sometimes balk at change, with open minds we come to recognize much of our knowledge is incomplete and that the “centers” of our personal universes are subject to change. But changing centers do not need to threaten our sense of security. As the COBE and WMAP satellites confirm and Inflation Theory describes, the universe began as a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. It began as a point smaller than what we can imagine and expanded in the so-called Big Bang. At the beginning, all the universe was in the “center.” You were in the center. You are, in fact, the center of the universe—as I am and as is everyone.
Take some consolation that there is that unchanging fact: You are your own center. The only way for it to shift, to change, is for you to discover something about yourself you never knew. That can only happen if you find new means to take the measure of yourself and those other “centers” you have chosen and then altered. Just remember Dr. Maedler’s choice of bright Alcyone as an immovable center: The brightest object on which you rest your attention and center your life might not be what you believe it is.
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