As close and hot as its rays may seem, the Sun stands majestically at a distance of 150 million km, away from our Earth where we live.
Our Earth circles round the Sun at the speed of nearly 30km per second, or 107km per hour. Yet we don’t feel the Earth’s rotation. Why?
Because of the force of gravity. The Earth has a gravitational pull of 9.8meters per second squared, and that strong force is what keeps us glued to the surface of the Earth while it spins at that high speed. As we are in motion in our locations, even our atmosphere is moving as fast as we are and relative to us, we remain in one place.
While the Earth is spinning round the Sun, the Moon is also spinning round our own Earth, at a very high speed as well. So there is perpetual rapid movement of the planetary bodies. A solar eclipse occurs when the three, the Sun 🌞, Moon 🌙 and the Earth 🌍 , all align and the Moon is in-between the Sun and the Earth, blocking our view of the Sun as it passes, then daytime suddenly becomes darkness. When the blockade is total, it is called, total solar eclipse.
When it is not total, it is called, partial solar eclipse. Because of the high speed that these planetary bodies are moving, these incidences last only for a few minutes and once in long whiles. That is why we are always excited to catch and document them. That’s what happened yesterday across parts of the Earth.
The period within which the Earth completes that journey round the Sun, is what is called, a YEAR. It is what has been further calculated and divided into 12 intervening months. And further divided into weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds and micro seconds. It is strictly based on the movement of planetary bodies. It is men that sat down to calculate and name the years and the months and the days. January to December, Monday to Sunday, 1 O’clock to 12 O’clock, weren’t created by God.
They were not named by God. God did not create the calendar. The months and days of the calendar were named by those who calculated the distance the Earth takes to move round the Sun. In fact, some months were named after Popes and some days after cultural ceremonies and deities.
God created the planets. He arranged them on their paths along their axis. He didn’t have to name any year or month or day because he dwells in timelessness. Time, in fact, is an illusion. A sort of mirage. Man is in a constant search to understand and explain the extent of this labyrinth.
He created a calendar as a milestone on a lonely highway. So when next you think about the months of the years and the weeks of the months and the days of the weeks and the hours of the days and the seconds in the hours, think not that they were created by God. They were created by man to calculate the movement of planetary bodies around the Sun.
That’s why a day here could be a year in another planet. Because the movement of that planet is on a different axis. That’s exactly what we are using our calendar for and once we depart this planet, all that time becomes null and void.
Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.
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