Water’s Not Always the Best Option!

My kids, like sooo many others love spending time watching YouTube videos. If you ask me, they spend way too much time doing that, BUT I must admit that sometimes they find some pretty cool stuff. Now if you know me well, you’ll know that though I never studied science formally after the regular high school subjects, I am a total GEEK when it comes to science! In recent years I am  particularly fascinated by physics and space, and when the kids showed me this video, my mind began to spin with an idea..

 

Go ahead and skip to 1:35, watch (at least part of) it here

 

So what exactly are we seeing here?  Oobleck is a wacky name (originally from Dr. Seuss) for one kind of non-Newtonian fluids. I know, I said the same thing: “what’s a non-Newtonian fluid?”. I looked it up, and here’s the skinny: one of Isaac Newton’s laws is about viscosity (the “thickness” of a fluid). Viscosity is one of those items that wine connoisseurs assess about a wine – you know, when they swish it around in the glass, like this guy:

 

So getting back to Newton, his law regarding viscosity is that fluids maintain their “thickness” no matter the forces exerted on it. So you can pour it or shake it or spin it – whatever –  and the viscosity remains the same. There are, however, a lot of examples of fluids that don’t react in this way. One of the most common-place examples is ketchup. Why do we always shake the bottle? Because the ketchup gets thinner when we shake it, making it more easily pourable. Oobleck is another, and despite its funny name, it’s really only corn starch mixed with water (and typically food coloring for fun).

 

If you watched the video (SPOILER ALERT), you noticed that when they dropped things into the big pool of oobleck from a height, the first reaction as the item hit the oobleck was HARD. The toilet bowl broke, the 30lb kettle bell bounced. THEN, however, they began to sink. This is because the properties of oobleck are the opposite of ketchup – when the liquid is more active it become thicker; so thick that it’s basically a hard solid. But after the moment of impact, or the energy has dissipated, it returns to a gooey, fluid state. You can see in the video too, that the kids have a hard time getting the items OUT of the pool; first, because the items themselves are heavy, but also because in order to get them out, the oobleck can’t get too excited or it just gets hard around the thing they’re trying to pull out. So the kids have to move SLOWLY in order to extract whatever they’ve dropped in there.

 

And HERE is where I want to make a point: there will be times in our lives when we must be like a Newtonian fluid. Times when no outside force is going change our state. We can think of character traits like perseverance. It can be moments of dedication to a cause, the pursuit of your deepest yearning, or patience and inner calm when someone is really rocking the boat and being an agitating force.

 

There are other times that we need to be like a non-Newtonian fluid. There are moments when it all flows more easily if we are willing to shake things up and put some energy into it. Here we may think of disrupting an old pattern or habit that is blocking our way and keeping us stuck. This is often what we do in traditional goal-setting. We sit down, formulate a plan and EXECUTE. There’s excitement, there’s energy! Now this is one of the things that makes being a human SO much cooler than being ketchup: if we can maintain that energy for long enough, we can actually change our resting “viscosity”. We’ve shaken up that old pattern or behavior to the point that our life in that area now just flows on its own! This can be said for anything you can set a S.M.A.R.T goal for – weight loss, finances, career climb, more involvement in your social life – anything where you can see the future result from where you’re sitting right now.

 

But what about those things you can’t really put your finger on? That niggle in the back of your mind that something is amiss, or there’s something “more” or “missing”? Those are our “oobleck” moments! It’s when the best course of action will be to move slowly and without force because moving fast just cements you further in place. Think about it for a second, how can we force our minds into discovering our purpose in this life? How can we pressurize to find our way to authentic confidence? How can we compel someone to love us? How can we hurry in our search for deep spirituality? How can we demand from our hearts and minds the creativity necessary to influence our sphere? We can try, but we’ll find that these efforts only create a hard oobleck wall, separating us from that which we are yearning to create. The answers we are seeking just stay stuck in the abyss, remaining unextractable.  It is these moments that require quiet finesse, not electric force, with ourselves.

 

In the self-development world, water is used a lot as an analogy. We should be like water as it flows over or through all obstacles, or we should be like a placid serene lake – you’ve heard all of these I’m sure. What I’m suggesting to you here, is that water isn’t the only useful fluid around! We have MORE possibilities, more choice. And some situations require us to make use of an INconstant state in order to move forward. Our task then, is to first, be aware that these choices even exist. And next to consciously decide (or unconsciously intuit) which moments and situations require us to be like which fluid.

 

I didn’t set out with this post to end with a pitch, I just had an idea and started writing like I always do. But I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t tell you that it is exactly this awareness that I help my coaching clients develop. There are many reasons why my business is called Inspiration Integration and this is one of them. The ability to balance our conscious and unconscious minds, I believe, is the key to all the doors we wish to open in our lives. And if you are reading this and saying “I would love some support in achieving this” then perhaps it is the right time for us to have a deeper conversation!

 

In any case, I hope that you’ve made a little (re)discovery in reading this today, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you again very soon!
Thank you for reading, and I would LOVE to hear your thoughts about this topic in the comments, on my social media channels or via email at angela@inspirationintegration.com

Til next time,

In Sisterly Love,

Angela