If you have ever sat by a pool of really calm water in a quiet forest, it is rather enchanting to watch the completely smooth water reflect the environment almost like a mirror. The perfect stillness creates a calm that seems to transcend all life forms and take on a magical vibe that reminds you of some tale you read long ago of fairies, sprites, and other whimsical fantasy.
Of course, eventually you are going to reach down and grab that pebble sitting next to you. You just cannot resist. You are human and you must exert your power over the world around you. An adult might last an hour or so, enjoying the calmness. A child about 10 seconds. That pebble is going to be causing a ripple in that still water, it is inevitable. Once you do, if you do not get carried away with a bunch of small pebbles, you will notice the waveform extrudes out from the point of impact in a circle. Waves go out from all angles and you see them spread across the pond.
I spent time when I was younger really trying to understand the science behind waveforms. It is sort of what led me into a path of being inquisitive about network communications. I was fascinated about using waveforms as a form of communication, so I gained some understanding along the way. You see when you picked up that pebble and through it into the air, you transferred energy. That was enough to push against gravitational forces until the pebble started plummeting downwards. Then the pebble impacted the water, transferring all the energy from the downward fall into the water molecules at the point of impact. This creates massive disruption and suddenly there is a significant amount of molecular activity, which causes the molecules to start moving extremely fast, which you visibly see as a waveform extending out from the point of impact.
What is really interesting is why they take on the waveform in the first place, but that is a concept for another blog. I want to talk about why this waveform becomes stable overtime until eventually once again returning to a still pond. Once the waves reach the edge of the pond, they will bounce back and you will start to have a chaotic mess of waves colliding into each other. You will very soon no longer be able to tell where the original source of the waves were. The surface will become choppy and chaotic, growing calmer as time goes on. But why?
This visual image that I am talking about here is ripe for comparison to our own lives, which is why I am bringing it up. I could go many directions with this, which is why I love the concept of oscillation in waves. The metaphor is powerful, which may be the reason why all great philosophy seems to come from people that live near beaches? For this blog I want to talk about dispersion and energy release. This is the reason that waves lose power. This applies to waves in water, sound waves, light, and any other form of molecular movement. As the excited molecules move through a particular medium, they collide and interact with slower moving molecules and as a result lose energy over time. Eventually the energy is completely dissipated and the waves attenuate to nothing perceptible.
I was originally thinking that this analogy would be great for habits. Talking about how your initial burst of energy in getting yourself going is eventually going to run out. As you bump and collide into life’s obstacles you dissipate that energy. You must continually add more energy to the mix, more pebbles in the pond, if you want the waves to continue. However, after I thought about it more, I realized there is a much more powerful lesson regarding the waveform itself.
You see any improvement we try to make in life, is going to require energy. An increase of energy produces a waveform. There is not a single instance in all of the physical world, where displacement of energy does not produce a wave. So I am going to assume that when we try to make a change in our lives, exert some energy in a positive direction, then there is going to be a resulting waveform. Which means that you are going to have UPs and DOWNs. There is no way around it. It will not be all good, and it will not be all bad. If you are expecting to be high the entire time, you will be derailed by the fact that you will experience lows. When you experience a low, know full well that another high is coming, unless all your energy gets dissipated! Then you will be just flat.
Now you have to deal with this fact. The larger, the more dense the medium that the wave is made in the faster the dissipation occurs. The energy transfer is much faster, but it also quickly fades because there are a lot more things to bump into. The stronger your mental strength as a person, the more that a small wave will have little impact on you. The little tiny pebble thrown at an ocean will hardly have an impact because the absorption rate of the large body of water is so great. The stronger and stronger you become the less small disruptions will have an impact on you. When you first start out, the smallest inconvenience will throw you completely off and you will quit easily. However, the longer you keep habits, and grow stronger as a person then these little disruptions that you experience will seem trivial.
However, just as in the science behind waveforms, there is a consequence of a larger, more dense medium. It is true that small disturbances will travel fast and not last long. However, that also means that in order to make improvements, or to cause something to travel far or have a real impact then you really have to transfer a lot of energy. The more vast or dense the medium, the greater the impact has to be to cause a wave that is noticeable. This explains why when you start out on a program of self improvement, the initial things that you do will have a really noticeable and powerful impact on your life. However, as you keep it up and your habits becomes more consistent, then these things have less and less of an impact on you. This means that you have to up your game and transfer far more energy into what you are doing to cause forward movement.
As you grow stronger you become stable and less susceptible to disruption. This is really a powerful consequence and one of the rewards of keeping and maintaining habits. The ups and downs are known to you now and you are able to keep momentum going despite them. However, you will come to the point where what you are doing is having less of an impact and you will need to challenge yourself, push harder and transfer more energy into the activity you are doing. When you figure out this cycle, you will notice that you will have established a new waveform – with a different frequency. Different frequencies interact with mediums in different waves. You will find your new and improved self will handle old obstacles with ease, however, the new obstacles will be worse then you have ever experienced before.
Seems to me that the universal laws of physics apply not only to our environment, but also to our own human experience. Since none of us are Wile E. Coyote, the laws of physics absolutely apply to us. We will just have to get used to the ups, downs, cycles and continued pressure to add more energy to our own waveform.
Guy Reams
