A revolution and a rotation are related concepts. Both involve circular motion, certainly. In each case, it is well within the realm of possibility to end where you had started. And you will, unless your momentum is sufficient. Good, old momentum: velocity times mass.
A simple rotation—say, toward and then away and then toward a celestial body, pulling an example from the very air—ends where it began. Kind of. Motion is strange. Motion in a universe made up of moving parts, all moving relative to one another is even stranger. For our argument, we will pretend the miniscule thousand miles we inch around our great and powerful axis in an hour is nothing, and that when we complete our rotation, we are back where we started.
We aren’t, of course. We’re actually one degree along a revolution. Sufficient unto the day is the evil therein, and we move past sixty-seven thousand little miles of daily evil in an hour and wait through another static sunrise and sunset, precisely because we are the ones moving at a blindingly fast crawl through galactic dust and detritus.
Were the sun bored, it could travel from itself to you and back two-and-one-half times in a lazy hour. The sun is not bored, though, and it has enough to do in its hour. And in that hour, the sun has knuckled down and trickled a sweet four-hundred-fifty-thousand miles around an orbit here in our scenic Milky Way that is longer than the distance from history to justice.
We revolve and we revolt.
And, in a year, maybe we are back where the revolution began, but maybe we aren’t. Maybe our yardstick, long as it is, has another notch, and maybe that notch matters. I hope so.
I hope you are out in the world, streaking along at mind-melting speeds and standing firm against the flood of artificial menace that has built up over the years, and ready to rage against the daily dying and rebirth of the light of democracy. I hope you see the shadows of hypocracy and the truth of the dream that is inherent to wherever-in-the-universe you are, and that you take to heart the fact that, tomorrow, you’ll be exactly where you started, only somewhere entirely else.
The universe is mostly empty space.
Space is mostly time.
Time, thus, is mostly empty.
Every event is not a world-ender, but every world-ender is still ahead of us, somewhere in the dark and empty beauty of space, wheeling toward us at four-hundred-fifty-thousand miles per hour, or perhaps sometimes five-hundred-seventeen thousand (when our orbit is in synchronicity with the path), and possibly five-hundred-eighteen thousand when the rotation around our axis and the revolution around the sun join the mad dash around the galactic hub, and all you have to do is hop, just a little.
Because, when you have five-hundred-eighteen thousand miles per hour of velocity, even your little mass becomes a momentum to be reckoned with.
Remember your power. Weild it daily.