Our solar system sits on a sub-spur of a minor spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy. Rendering by NASA. Our solar system’s location noted by the writer, who lives in the neighborhood.

When Everything Spirals

Spirals are beautiful in nature, not so much in human nature

Nature abhors straight trajectories, a bit of cosmic fortune behind much beauty and destruction, a universal reality that originated near the very beginning of time, when everything racing outward from the Big Bang began to curve under the force of gravity.

At the risk of oversimplifying some very complex cosmological concepts, curvature is the mother of spin—technically angular momentum. Spin is the Ginger Rogers to the gravity of Fred Astaire, and a catalyst for everything that exists today. And more than anything else that doesn’t trace perfect lines from A to B, nature really loves a good spiral. From sea shells to roses, hurricanes to galaxies, spirals are everywhere.

If I may put a fresh spin on all this:

Spirals in nature are beautiful. Spirals in human nature, not so much.

Yet we are, by nature, highly prone to emotional storms that can spiral out of control, down and downer. Amid all its joys and challenges, successes and disasters, good times and bad, life never moves in a straight line. Try as we might, and even with all the luck in the world, tricky twists and turns and frustrating speed bumps will knock us off the ideal course we might imagine. It’s the random nature of the human…