Father Sky

Have you ever wondered why you can’t feel the pull of the moon? Well, OK, probably not tops on your list of things to ponder. But how is it that this tiny ball so far away can pull our great oceans into a rhythmic tidal dance? It barely takes up half of one degree of the sky yet clearly can shake things up down here.

Actually, I didn’t think of it much either until a few weeks ago my daughter and I were playing around with acting out Newton’s three great laws. The third law states, (I’m sure you all have it memorized but I’ll repeat it just for content sake), “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. To demonstrate it I had us stand facing each other and asked her to give me a push. The intent was for her to not only push me back a bit but to also feel herself be pushed back at the same time. The funny thing was, it didn’t work. I quickly concluded she was subconsciously compensating and leaning in to the push, ever so slightly. It wasn’t until we were standing toe-to-toe that she got the expected “opposite reaction” to pushing me.

That’s what got me thinking. Are we actually feeling the pull of the moon every time it passes overhead but over the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence have we developed a “lunar compensation”?

Lune

And perhaps that pull influenced our development in some way. Is this beautiful neighbor more than just something to howl at or stare at in our lover’s embrace? Does it also provide a daily tug that “re-boots our hard-drive”, re-sets our hormone balance, or some other affect at the micro level. One that is so natural, so ingrained that we don’t feel it anymore. Something that is so “human” that we don’t even know how to test for it.

Perhaps silly speculation after too much turkey. Or just being “Loony”.

Photo courtesy of ComputerHotline