November 10, 2004

Newton's Third Law of Motion

My last science class in high school was Physics. Even though I tended towards subjects like History and English, I always liked Physics too. It was the one science class I truly enjoyed.

The world functions, in part, according of the "natural laws" of physics. They make sense to me, at least, the low-level physics I learned in high school. Gravity, for instance, is a concept I get. It's the reason I can stand on the Earth, as opposed to floating around the atmosphere. Velocity – speed and direction – makes sense to me. But my favorite law of physics is Newton's Third Law of Motion:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This strikes me as a law with application broader than just as a law of motion. It feel like a social law or a psychic law, something maybe akin to karma. I've been thinking about Newton's Third Law, lately, as I've been writing about RA. Why? It seems like the more I write about having RA, the more I write about why I write. Could it be that my "equal and opposite reaction" is my RA and my writing?

The idea of an equal and opposite effect to a condition like rheumatoid arthritis is a powerful concept to me. According to Newton, in the physical world, whenever objects A and B interact with each other, they exert forces upon each other. So A gets a force and B gets a force and where they meet they create the concept of action and reaction. Action and reaction, working together, create all sorts of good results. A fish can swim through water because of action and reaction. The fish uses its fins to propel itself through water, but the water itself accelerates and helps push the fish through the water.

The more I write about RA, the less power and control it has over me as a person. As I gain control of my destiny as a person, I continue to write and my identity as a writer makes me less susceptible to defining myself through my disease. It almost hurts my head to conceptualize this in the language of physics and yet oddly satisfying and rewarding (more action and reaction working? Could be!).

Think, for a minute, about another application of Newton's Third Law: you can't touch something without being touched back by it. There is something delicate and interactive about this concept of touch and touching. It is the same as writing – the writing isn't complete until someone reads, understands and then reaches their own conclusion about what the writer is saying. Every action does have an equal and opposite reaction.

When I first thought about having RA, it was very one way. There was just the force of it working on me but no opposite and equal reaction. I think in non-physics terms, that I had to choose to be the equal and opposite reaction. And that's what makes people different than the other stuff in the world. Choice. Free will.

So the more I write about RA the more I discover about myself as a writer. And the more I touch things in the world, the more I'm able to be touched back by them.

Physics. Isn't it grand?

Posted by renee | Filed under:

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Posted by: from psychic medium at December 4, 2007 1:27 PM

Posted by: from psychic medium at December 4, 2007 1:27 PM

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