The Force

The Force

    Call it what you will, the force, the natural order, the flow of the universe, there are days when you feel that you are fighting it, when it seems that you want to go one way and the "it" doesn't.  Bags break, your thumb jams, you need an extra part...the things can all be minor, but bit by bit they all add up throughout the day and before long you feel as if everything is going wrong.  As the Borg would say, resistance is futile.  I often notice this when I swim for even after all these years, there are people older, fatter, more athletically mis-shapen in appearance who plunge in the water and are suddenly gliding past me as if they are Olympic athletes.  How unfair is that?  But surely it is because they are only doing one tiny lap and they are sprinting, I try to rationalize; but often they are swimming as much, or more, than I am?  How can that be?  But long ago I let that go, that comparing myself to others and trying to be the fastest or the fittest or the smoothest.  Now I simply work on me, on what I might be doing differently in my strokes or in my breathing to get to their natural glide...those thoughts usually lasts for a few seconds; and then I wonder if I am simply fighting the force.

    This is similar to the art of aikido, a martial arts style which uses your opponent's force against him or her.  Imagine throwing a punch and instead of having it blocked or having it strike, it is instead pulled through (thus pulling you off balance) and then with a flowing curve motion brought back around over your shoulder (down you go).  The harder you throw the punch, the harder you will fall back to the ground.  Theirs is a simple principle of your muscles and tendons can only go to a certain point or direction (grab your right wrist and twist it inward to grasp this idea).  Throw that same punch with your right hand and have it grabbed and twisted right or left as you tumble...ouch (throw that punch hard and you likely won't be using that arm for a bit).  This martial arts technique uses natural force, going with the flow instead of opposing it, a basic belief of their teachings.

    Flow is one of the most interesting concepts of Zoom by astrophysicist Bob Berman.  The opening of the book's jacket reads: If you sit as still as you can in a quiet room, you might be able to convince yourself that nothing is moving.  But air currents are still wafting around you.  Blood rushes through your veins.  The atoms in your chair giggle furiously.  In fact, the planet you are sitting on is whizzing through space thrity-five times faster than the speed of sound.  As he says later in the book: Actually, you yourself are moving even when you're doing the couch-potato thing.  All landmasses are shifting, carrying you and your TV toward the west if you live in the United States...Nowadays we know of eight separate landmasses, each chugging along in various directions.  The Hawaiian chain is the fastest moving, as it heads to the northwest at the rate of four-inches annually.  We can now also easily match geologic features on one continent's edge with those on another's, proving they were connected in the not-so-distance past.  For example, eastern South America and western Africa not only share specific fossils and even living animals found nowhere else.  Similarly, the Appalachians and Canada's Laurentian Mountains are a perfect continuous match with rock structures in Ireland and Britain.  All the evidence proves that the separate continents were once a single supercontinent--the famous Pangaea.  It formed three hundred million years ago and started breaking apart one hundred million years later.

    Sometimes when I swim I play back that "use the Force" line from Star Wars; if I'm struggling or trying too hard to get the laps finished, I fall back on that and try to slow down or to simply listen to my body and the water.  Some would call it zoning out or listening to the universe, others might call it meditating or simply getting into the present.  Whatever.  Steven Hawking in his new PBS series, Genius, shows that even when we think our thoughts might be random (such as hitting a button to stop a wheel at a certain point), our brains have already made the decision and relayed the message to our body...it is then our body reacts.  Predestined, predetermined?  Is that the Force?  Have our decisions been made and we are trying to tell our brain "no?"  Who knows?  For me, I have found that sometimes things just go wrong...and that there's nothing wrong with that.  You can try and try and try and even adjusting to the flow doesn't seem to work...and that's okay.  Sometimes you just want to tell the Force to bugger off.

    Maybe this was all summed up when actor Hugh Laurie was asked by Men's Journal about advice he would give to his younger self (it a good exercise, that of imagining you being asked the same question and seeing what you would answer).  Here's what he said: Life goes faster than you think; you're not going to live for a thousand years, so make every day count.  Actually, that's really trite.  OK, you don't regret the things you do, only the things you don't do.  No, wait, that can't be universally true — look at serial murder, for example.  I should be able to do better than that. . . . Don't smoke cigarettes.  It's a terrible mistake.