Another way to write the title of this post would be:  thoughts that get you into a continuous loop.  And, there aren’t many of those types of thoughts.  At least not for me.

Some people think the question, “Which came first – the chicken or the egg?”  is a thing with no end (TWNE).  But, I don’t get caught up in that one.  To me, it’s true that we don’t know the definitive answer to that question, but I think everyone agrees that there is an answer.  It had to be either one or the other.  I might guess that creationists are on the side of the chicken and evolutionists lean toward the egg, but I don’t really want to get in the middle of that discussion.

For one woman in 1994, this question was a TWNE:  “If you could live forever, would you and why?”  Sound familiar?  That was asked of Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss America Contest.  Amazingly enough, lots of folks must have agreed with her – about the question being a TWNE.  She was chosen as Miss America 1995.  Here’s her answer:

“I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,”   

Note the comma after that last “forever”.   I’m not sure that she wouldn’t still be stating and restating that TWNE if the MC hadn’t needed to give some of the other contestants a chance to nail their questions.

Here’s my TWNE:  What holds up the planets?  I don’t see this as a religious issue — however you want to think the planets got here, how do you think the whole place stays together?

Here’s the loop I get into.  So, the planets are just out in space.  But, the centrifugal force of us going around the sun creates a gravitational pull that keeps all the planets in place.  Although I don’t see how.  It seems to me that the level of gravity that would be required to keep the Earth in place should be enough of a pull so that if you dropped something really light – like a Kleenex, it should fall up, not down.

So, then what holds the Sun and stuff in place?  Well, we’re in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is a “large system of stars held together by mutual gravitation and isolated from similar systems by vast regions of space”.  So, now we’ve got regions of space which certainly aren’t solid, and which have black holes in them which suck in anything in their path.  Except for the galaxies and planets.  For some reason.  And whatever does get “sucked in” disappears and goes. . . where??

And, here’s the kicker.  If you could sit high above all this stuff and see as far as there are galaxies, what would you see at the “horizon”?  Is there a horizon?  Are there an infinite number of galaxies and regions of space?  This is where I get a brain freeze, and it’s not from chugging a frozen Margarita.

So, I finally give up trying to get my head around it and decide that we just may be encased in an amulet hanging around a cat’s neck. . .