July 13, 2022Science 101

Continuing the thoughts from last week’s blog and all the wonderful books I will need to part with … remember in school when we groaned about how all that stuff we had to learn was not practical and would never mean anything to us in everyday life?

Then we grew up and found out that, Hey! We DO use all that stuff after all!

Stuff like math, which, it turns out, is very useful for figuring out how much paint to buy to paint a room.

And stuff like science … which makes me understand that although nature abhors a vacuum, that doesn’t mean that I can have an infinite number of books in the finite space of a single closet.

No matter how loudly those boxed books call out to me.

Creatives like me have ponies. All that means is that we tend to run on our emotions. We’re romantics and idealists. When we look up at the night sky, we don’t see spheres of rock and chemicals being controlled and driven by magnetic forces and gravity in the vacuum of space, causing them to hurl through space as they spin around and around one another.

Nope.

When we look up, we see stars that dance and glow, and moons and planets that make our minds and hearts dream and wonder and ponder. Then we go do our art, hoping that others will see and dream and wonder and ponder, too.

We’re the story tellers and the dreamers. With color and music and words, we bring the abstract things into the real world where others can experience them, too. We give meaning to the practical.

But the purely practical is important, too. The human race has a good balance of the dreamers and the practical ones. We need those who can look up at the night sky and who understand and explain those chemicals and forces and how everything works together. They show us how the practical is useful.

Our differences are meant for us to serve one another, but many times we let our differences divide us.

Just like the human race has a good mix of dreamers and practical ones, even within our own hearts, there’s this conflict between the two sides. We will have a natural, preferred bent towards one side, but still we need to heed the tuggings from the other side.

So when the boxed books are calling to me and my emotional pony switches into high gear trying to find a way to keep them, the practical part of my brain will remind me that there’s a finite amount of space in that closet. It cannot hold an infinite number of books.

There’s still going to be some back and forth … emotions don’t typically surrender without a bit of protest. But there’s not much to be done when the physical laws of nature stand in the way. Romantics and dreamers sometimes have to concede to logic and science.

There’ll be some regrets, some mourning, and maybe even a tear or two … the changes I’m going through are hard and exciting, all at the same time.