Some days weigh more than others. After a week that has weighed on me quite a lot, and probably will continue to for a while, the idea of weight and how we use it really captured my imagination. I’ve incorporated it into my ongoing writing project, but I thought it was worth mentioning since yesterday was World Mental Health Day and today is not.

We call it weight maybe because of the tension we feel in our muscles. It’s easy to communicate that way, we can all recognize that feeling. Some might call it stress. Others might call it in extreme cases a form of depression. These are, I suppose, specialized types of weight with their own nomenclature, and I’ll leave that for others to write about – quite enough exists on those topics, and they certainly don’t need another layperson messing things up on the Internet.

What causes this weight? I have a few ideas. When we talk about weight, in the sense of Physics, we’re really talking about mass and the acceleration due to gravity, multiplied by each other. Acceleration due to gravity, you may be surprised, varies a bit around the world, but it’s got an average we work with for the entire planet.

As with people. The metaphorical acceleration due to gravity varies from person to person – one could even argue that there’s a standard deviation that we call ‘normal’. Metaphorical mass is generally what changes in our lives. But is it really weight? Is that such a good metaphor?

When you have multiple things happening at the same time, it’s not as hard, it’s not as heavy. Things move along. But the second one thing goes sideways, the day can become a bit more heavy because of it. This sounds a little more like inertia. When you’re trying to do too much, when something goes wrong and you get a cascade of problems…

And how do we deal with this stuff anyway? Maybe we reduce what we’re doing and focus on less.

Nonetheless, there are some days when the world weighs more than others.