​Up

All matter (Earth, you, a pencil, a speck of dust) exerts a gravitational force. Objects with greater mass (not necessarily size) exert greater gravitational force than those of smaller mass. Earth’s gravitational field is a well down which you fall even as you are the gravitational well down which Earth falls. Earth and you attract, but Earth attracts more. It is from this relationship between your mass and Earth’s that we get our sense of up and down. Up is a direction opposite to the gravitational well of Earth. Generally, up is away from Earth’s center. Why “generally”?
 
Mass determines gravity’s “pull.” Take a plumb bob on a string to the base of the Himalayas, and see what happens. Instead of “pointing downward” toward Earth’s center, the bob will lie askew, a bit tilted so to speak. The Himalayas, rising to the height of Mt. Everest, have a massive, deep hidden “root” below the surface, deeper, in fact, than the mountains are high. Earth’s crust is very thick there. More mass, more pull. The plumb bob “falls” a bit sideways toward the mountain system’s center of gravity. Down and up are different there.
 
We all live much of our lives on the basis of general predictability. “Up” should be up; down, down. We expect the world to conform to our experience and knowledge. In some places, however, we find a skewed plumb bob. There’s a pull from an unexpected direction. Some mass warps the ordinary field.
 
Beneath the visible mountain of everyone’s life is a hidden root, a mass with its own gravitational pull. That’s why the plumb bob of relationships is a bit skewed and up and down lie in an unexpected plane, even when the surface, like the great Himalayas, seems to be the dominant mass.