Aphelion

There and back again

IN 1986 I was 12 years old, and I was obsessed with Halley's comet (spelled with two Ls, like Poonawalla). By that time, I was devouring all the science fiction I could get my hands on, playing with legos, and learning dungeons and dragons. My imagination was boiling and impossible to contain, and my curiosity about everything was impossible to quench. The comet was a symbol to me of everything my boyhood mind wanted and dreamt about. And that year, the comet reached perihelion on Feb. 9th, just days before my birthday.

I tried for weeks to get a chance to go outside and see it but was repeatedly foiled. Finally, I got my chance - well past the peak viewing - and managed to go out and catch a glimpse. it wasn't much, but it still stunned me. In my mind, I asked myself, who will I be when it comes back? At age 12, you are old enough to understand enough about yourself to be able to ask that question, even if you aren't old enough to understand what the answers might be.

On Saturday, Dec 9th, 2023, Halley's comet reached aphelion, the furthest point from the Sun. As of that date, just two months ago, Halley's comet is no longer leaving. It is coming back. It has been slowing these past few decades until now, it is barely crawling along at about 2000 mph. That may seem fast but compare that to 121,000 mph at perihelion! Even though it is on one level just a big snowball obeying Kepler's Law, I think it is fitting. Big decisions require you to slow down.

Since my teenage and young adult years, I've long had this strange idea that my fate was bound in some way to the comet, the thought of which had enormous power over my impressionable romantic mind. I think I still believe it - that no matter what else happens, the comet will be a bookend between the fading in of my consciousness 38 years ago at age 12, and my fading out, 38 years from now, at age 88.

And here I am, literally in the middle, just like the comet, slowing down and reorienting. Unlike the comet, I only get one trip, but it's more than enough.

Just a few moments past aphelion (measured by the comet's perspective) I turn 50, a mystical and meaningful number, and the new path before me is incomprehensibly different from where I started. New career, new city. Loss of loved ones. Kids now on the cusp of adulthood. And I am in many ways at the peak of my physical and mental power. This middle is not a mid-life crisis, but a sea change.

I have slowly and painstakingly learned, error by error, that the most important thing is to define myself in terms of myself. I have discovered, through experience, what Gibran meant by "life's heart." It is a revelation and still a mystery. Loki speaks of Glorious Purpose. Mobius retorts, "Most purpose is less glory and more burden." Leaving glory behind, what remains is essential: the self.

I don't know what the next ten or twenty years will be like or where I will be when I get there. This milestone is also the end of a journey outwards, and now I am coming home, just like the comet. Indeed, to Him we belong, and to Him is our eventual return.

The comet obeys the law of tawhid; the one true sun, the center of its orbit, the hand that carries it forever also consumes it. I know what that is like, to submit, to fall inwards, to orbit. Every time Halley's comet comes home, it loses pieces of itself. Eventually, the comet will fade away completely.

But luminous beings are we - not this crude matter!

I don't intend to fade away. I am not a comet - I control my path. I appreciate and accept the path I had to take, and the control I had to surrender. Now I have orbited long enough, and I decide where I go from here. In another 37 years, if I am still here, I am going to greet the comet at perihelion, and then maybe it and I will go home together.