Recalibrating on Earth: Sunita Williams & Yours Truly!

Raju Korti
With age catching up on me and life gravitating towards more and more philosophical, I have begun to believe that Philosophy isn't just about cosmic issues.  Every day is full of events that raise philosophical, and even existential, questions: Something even as mundane as why do we eat the things we eat, work the way we work, go to the places we go. This time round, my philosophical quest has aimed for something much higher.

Sunita Williams: A NASA website grab

I watched Sunita Williams’ space odyssey unfold -- nine months stranded among the stars, tethered to the International Space Station, her body suspended in a weightless void. It stirred something deep within me. Nine months. A span that human foetus gravitates the womb. For the 59-year-old gutsy Sunita, this was a gestation of endurance, not birth, a quiet drift through the cosmos.

True to my latest affliction that Science can be on one side and Philosophy on the other, I was stuck by what was said upon her return: That it would take weeks for her to recalibrate. As in her muscles groping for gravity’s pull, her senses relearning the Earth’s firm embrace, her blood settling after months of floating free. Weeks to reclaim what once came naturally. And as I followed her physical descent, I couldn’t help but turn inward: what does it mean for me to come back to myself, when I have been given not months, but a lifetime, and still feel adrift?I am no astronaut, but I feel the echo of that disorientation. I think of my own returns, not from orbit, but from lifetimes I can’t quite grasp. They say we take multiple births, souls spiralling through existence, each one a chance to recalibrate, to find our footing on this strong but unstable rock. Yet here I am, still floundering. Sunita will eventually stand steady after months in the void. I have had eons, and still I stumble. My soul, perhaps, is like her body: unmoored, slow to adjust to the weight of being human again. Gravity pulls, but I resist, caught in some eternal hesitation.

She trained for it. Years of preparation for that descent, that recalibration. Me? I have had no manual, no mission control. Just the raw repetition of birth and death, each cycle a blunt reminder that I haven’t figured it out. The astronauts come back with data. I come back with fragments like half-remembered instincts, a vague ache for something I can’t name. They call it triumph when Sunita’s feet touch soil again. What would they call it when I open my eyes anew, still lost?

Sunita’s struggle was finite. Nine months, a capsule, a landing. Mine is boundless, a thread stretched across lives I can’t count. She adapted because she had to; I flounder because I can. The universe doesn’t demand my mastery, only my persistence. And so, I keep going, birth after birth, recalibrating not to Earth alone, but to the quiet, stubborn hope that one day I will stand firm. Not just in body, but in being.