Black Holes and the Silence That Surrounds Them
If you have been reading my essays for a while, you know I rarely end where I begin. I often start with something from the natural world and end up somewhere inside our own. This one is no different.
In space, a black hole forms when a star collapses under its own weight. The outward pressure—the energy that once held it up—fails. What’s left is an object so dense, so heavy, that nothing can escape its gravitational pull. Not matter. Not even light. Black holes don’t make themselves visible. They reveal themselves through what happens around them. Light bends. Matter spirals. Time slows. Everything within its proximity distorts. They don’t shout. They pull.
Once you learn that, you start noticing how often the universe recycles its lessons.
Because we live among black holes, too. Not the cosmic kind, but the emotional, organizational, and cultural ones. They form when something central collapses—an idea, a relationship, a truth—and no one addresses it. It becomes easier to adjust, to work around it, to lower expectations, than it is to name what fell apart. And so we orbit. We bend. We distort.
Some of these black holes are deeply personal. Others are shared. But the pattern is always the same: the collapse is quiet, and the pull is enormous.
The loss of a child. Black hole.
The fear of being replaced by a younger colleague. Black hole.
A founder’s outdated vision that still controls every decision. Black hole.
The project no one believes in anymore, but no one dares to end. Black hole.
A traumatic event a team “moved on” from too quickly. Black hole.
A family member everyone tiptoes around. Black hole.
The silence after negative feedback. Black hole.
The moment the mission lost its meaning. Black hole.
They don’t always feel dramatic. But they pull just the same. Meetings grow quieter. Energy dims. Communication warps. Eventually, we stop trying to escape the gravity and just settle into orbit. We call it culture. Or legacy. Or tradition. But really, it’s inertia. We stop moving forward because something collapsed, and we pretended it didn’t.
So what do we do?
Astronomers can’t see black holes directly. They detect them by observing what happens around them—the swirl of light, the distortion of space, the accelerated motion of matter. It’s not the black hole itself that reveals the truth. It’s the way everything nearby reacts to it. That’s how we find ours, too. We look for the energy that’s missing. The ideas that fade. The people who step back. The silence that spreads in rooms where something once lived.
Start by observing the edges. Don’t look for what’s missing, look for what’s distorting. Pay attention to where energy vanishes, where people stop talking, where tension thickens but no one can name the source. Ask what conversations never seem to happen. Ask who stopped showing up fully. Ask what subjects always get redirected.
Then, name it. Not with blame. Not with fanfare. But with clarity. "This thing happened, and we never dealt with it." "This rule has outlived its purpose." "This silence is costing us." Naming a black hole doesn’t fix it, but it pulls the truth back into the room and that changes everything.
Sometimes the gravity breaks when it's simply acknowledged. Sometimes it takes new leadership. Sometimes it takes time. But nothing shifts until someone stops spinning and says, "Wait. Why are we still orbiting this?"
Black holes don’t erase what came before. They mark where something powerful once existed—something that shaped us, maybe even defined us. But they are not a destination.
At some point, we have to stop circling what’s gone.
Not to forget it. Not to undo it. But to remember that movement is not the same as progress and gravity is not the same as direction.