Equal and Opposite

As a student of science, I am beginning to understand a few of the very basic ideas that are fundamental to a scientific education. Often, I find, with chemistry and physics at least, it is difficult to understand the real world applications of these fundamental ideas. Two scientific ideas that have been exemplified in my life this week are Newton’s Third Law and Le Chatelier’s Principle. My week has been governed by either or both of these laws, depending on if you are physics or chemically minded. I just realised that I have started writing this blog as a lab report. That is sad. I shall endeavour not to.

Nobody puts or thinks inside the box

For those of us that are less scientific in upbringing, or perhaps their scientific understanding has moved on to greater heights and they no longer remember these basic ideas here they are to refresh your memory:

Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite and opposite reaction.

Newton

Le Chatelier’s Principle: (Effectively) If an equilibrium is altered, the system will move to correct this change.

Le Chat. 

My life is a delicate balance. I walk the fine line between kind of organised and an absolute mess. Normally, that’s completely fine. Except, for a fateful moment early this week, when I temporarily forgot my training. In what later came to be seen as a very Rookie move, I thought to myself, with exams coming up, ‘tidy room, tidy mind.’

What kind of loser cleans their room if they don’t need to find something?

A constant state of disarray

However, personally, I thought that Life’s equal and opposite reaction to my tidying my room was a bit over the top. Life took it’s own back rather more than it needed to.

Anyway, in order to correct the equilibrium that had been altered by my tidying my room, life decided it was high time that my memory stick had an unsupervised sleep over at university. And elope.

As it is should be

Losing one’s memory stick would ordinarily not be that much of a problem, except my faithful laptop has been in and out of the computer hospital all year (I think he might pass away soon). So everything was saved on my memory stick. The retyping of my assignments was a royal waste of time (royal because I am pretty much royalty – see earlier posts). This made me very unhappy. And I got sore hands. It wasn’t good. Or pretty.

However, obviously Life decided that this reaction did not equal my initial action, so it continued to react (equal and opposite, remember).

How much stuff can we fit in the cupboard and make it look tidy-ish?

So Life took my toothbrush.

Yeah, I know. Not a big deal. But I find brushing my teeth very soothing. Like, very soothing. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little OCD about it. Ordinarily, I actually have about 4 or 5 toothbrushes on the go at once, located in different rooms around the house so that if I’m feeling a bit anxious, there is toothbrush handy for my self-soothing technique. But I was down to one. And I life took it. And I lost my self-soothing technique. And so I couldn’t self-soothe. And what does a baby do if it can’t self-soothe?

The bench on a tidier-than-usual day

But Life had still not corrected the room tidying in which I had so wrongfully indulged at the beginning of the week. The third and arguably biggest way (although, please don’t underestimate how losing my toothbrush affected me) that Life pushed back was by having me forget that I was meeting someone for coffee. It makes me feel terrible even thinking about it. My very first thought was to text Mother Bear and tell her that we were related after all, because I just forgot a coffee date too (this is a common thing for my mum to do). She replied with (what I thought to be very ironic):

‘What have I forgotten this week? I don’t remember.’

(She actually went around to a friends place for dinner last night to find them not there, because it was actually Sunday night, not Saturday that they had invited her for – c’est la vie in my family)

Best pick up line ever. 

So, hopefully, Life has re-equilibrated, and finished reacting in equal and opposite force. I’ve paid my penance. I’ve repented my sins. I’ve learnt my lesson; no more room tidying for me.

If you get this, you are definitely a nerd.

Welcome to the club. 

Don’t mess with Newton. Or Le Chatelier. Or science.