You can’t help but notice centers and figuratively ‘pick them out in a crowd’. Their often huge concentrations of mass and energy making them the brightest, hottest, most agitated in their vicinity –centers stick out like sore thumbs. In nature they are the fury of a tornado’s funnel cloud, the perpetual nuclear fusion reaction (i.e. sun) at the heart of solar systems, and shine as brightly as a million stars in a supernovae explosion.
In the human realm of being centers often translate into being the most powerful and ‘extreme’. Centers can be the biggest, tallest, richest, most colorful, most attractive, most active, loudest, most frantic, and most extraordinary. They are city centers, the heart of the matter, when people “blow up” in arguments, and the wild activity of rock singers on center stage at concerts.
Silent Centers
But for all the sound and fury we associate with centers, centers also routinely display the opposite qualities of stillness, silence, and serenity.
We can see the calm side of centers in the eye of hurricanes, in the quiet moments marking remembrances, the greens of city centers, and in the grace marking the center of bows and curtseys. In extreme cases, centers aren’t even visible! Such is the case with powerful “black holes” at the center of galaxies which can’t even be ‘seen’, the invisible strike zone above baseball’s central home plate, and the sun over head (which we can’t view directly).
Centers also express the power of the void, emptiness, nothingness, and zero. They are the place where all things add up to zero –they are the ‘null balance point’ where all gravity vectors ‘zero-out’ at the center of planets and stars, where equal and opposite reactions interact with a net result of zero, and where opposite electrical charges are quantum mechanically extinguished.