Racing Through the Universe, Yet Sitting Still

We are traveling faster than any rocket ever built — yet the tea in our cup does not tremble.

Every morning I step outside my house, pass by the old walls of Shalimar, feel the winter air of Lahore, and everything appears calm. The sky is still. The trees are quiet. Even the birds sitting on electric wires look as if the world is perfectly stable.

But the truth is astonishing.

At this very moment, the Earth beneath my feet is moving at nearly 30 kilometers per second around the Sun. In the time you finish reading this sentence, we have already traveled hundreds of kilometers through space.

And that is only the beginning.

The Sun itself — carrying Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and all of us — is orbiting the center of the Milky Way at about 220 kilometers per second. Somewhere deep in that galactic center lies Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole, silently anchoring our cosmic neighborhood. One full orbit around it takes about 225 million years. When dinosaurs walked on Earth, we were in a completely different part of the galaxy.

And even that is not the full story.

Our Milky Way galaxy itself is drifting through space, moving toward the Andromeda Galaxy, while also traveling at hundreds of kilometers per second relative to the cosmic background radiation — the afterglow of the Big Bang.

If you combine all these motions, you realize something unbelievable:

You are moving faster than any rocket humanity has ever launched.

Yet you feel nothing.

Your coffee does not spill.
The ocean does not crash from the speed.
The sky does not blur like a fast-forwarded video.

Why?

Because we do not feel speed.
We feel change in speed.

If you sit in an airplane cruising smoothly, you feel still. Only when it accelerates or shakes do you sense motion. Earth is doing the same thing — moving smoothly, steadily, carrying oceans, air, cities, mountains, and us together in perfect harmony.

Motion without disturbance becomes stillness.

And perhaps that is where the science ends and the philosophy begins.

There is something deeply poetic about this reality. We are racing through the universe at unimaginable speeds, yet inside our homes we argue, we dream, we worry about promotions, politics, and tomorrow’s meetings.

The universe is violent and fast — stars exploding, galaxies colliding, space expanding — yet within that storm, there is a tiny blue planet where a human being can sit quietly and think.

Maybe stillness is not the absence of movement.

Maybe stillness is alignment.

When everything around you moves together — you call it stability.

When your inner world is aligned — you call it peace.

Perhaps life is the same. A person may be passing through intense motion — career pressures, existential questions, responsibilities, disappointments — but if the inner universe is balanced, he feels calm.

We are passengers on a cosmic ship moving at terrifying speed.
Yet we call this motion “home.”

And sometimes I wonder…

If the outer universe can move so fast and still remain graceful, perhaps we too can move through life’s chaos without losing our inner stillness.

We are not standing still.

We are flowing — together — through the silent river of space.

And that, somehow, feels peaceful. 🌌