In Motion: Day 44

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There is no wasted energy as Kim Soo-Nyung raises her bow. She draws the string back to her lips and pauses, brow furrowed. The three fingers on her right hand are gently restraining the string. She pauses only a moment to take a breath and zero in on the target. She releases the string, allowing it to whip forward and propel the arrow through seventy meters of empty air, into the center of the target.

From the time of release to the time of impact, the arrow travels through the air for a bit longer than a second. Let’s just round to a second to make it easier. If the arrow travels about seventy meters in about a second, then it’s trivial to say that it would travel about thirty-five meters in a half-second; seventeen-and-a-half meters in a quarter-second, and so on. If you’re worried that this post will be about math, don’t worry, the math is behind us already.

If we continue measuring smaller and smaller amounts of time, we get to a point where we’re talking about one single instance of time, during which the arrow has no time to travel through the air. If seconds are composed of half-seconds, and half-seconds of quarter-seconds, then all of time is composed of these single instances, is it not? This may sound like a familiar thought experiment to some of you, and you’d be right. This is an idea introduced to the history books by a long dead Greek guy, historically remembered as Zeno.

Zeno’s thought was that in any given instance, or a freeze-frame of time, there is no motion. Which means that all motion is just a bunch of non-motion, stitched together. Or in his words, “movement is composed of immobilities”¹. Today, this idea is widely considered to be bunk. People who may be less keen, but who were born later than Zeno, concluded that there is no instance of time which has zero duration. Ergo, the arrow will always travel at least a tiny amount of distance in any given timeframe. (I’ve always wanted to use ergo in a sentence, yay).

It's at this point that you might be wondering “Where is the sharp turn into nonsense territory that is the quintessence of this blog”? If so, you might also correctly guess that that turn is here.

When I was a young kid, I had these black basketball shoes that I wore to middle school every day (though, I didn’t play basketball). I think we got them from Walmart. As you might imagine, a thirteen-something-year-old boy wore through a pair of shoes faster than you can say athlete’s foot, but we didn’t have any money for new shoes at the time. It got to the point where I was holding the sole to the rest of the shoe with a few feet of duct tape. As you might also imagine, being the duct-tape-shoe-kid was not a title of honor in a middle school.

Back then, I gave my Mom such a hard time about my crappy shoes. I felt our lack of money was her failure that I was paying for. Today, I look back on that memory with embarrassment; not for the state of my shoes, but for how I treated my Mom, who was just doing her best to give me the best life she could. Thanks, Ma.

When we look that far back in our lives, the changes we’ve undergone are abundantly clear. A memory that I once avoided due to bitterness, I now value as a lesson of appreciation.

Like an arrow in flight, there is no single instance of time where we are not undergoing change. We are not gods, and we are not traveling at the speed of light, so for us time marches steadily onward. Every second, half-second, or quarter-second, we are changing. As much as you aren’t the person you were fifteen years ago, you aren’t the person you were one picosecond ago. There’s no stopping the motion, so the best you can do is take a deep breath, and aim.

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I feel a sense of dread reading back over this page. There are so many words and so little said. Others have written about similar ideas, but better and more concisely. Who am I to step up onto a soapbox and shout? The answer I’ve settled on is that we’re all telling each other the same stories for the same reasons that the first person told the first story. It’s an expression of our souls – something that couldn’t be restrained even if we tried. We are each retelling stories that resonate with us in ways that might resonate with someone else, and thus we pass knowledge and ideas through time and space.

Stories are what makes us human, but that’s a tale as old as time, too.

1. Read more about the dead Greek dude here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/