Pressure. Google defines pressure (yes, Google has replaced my Oxford, as well as dictionary.com =P) as the force asserted on a unit area of surface, measured in Pascals. For the engineers out there, pressure is extremely important; how much pressure can the bridge withstand? How much pressure will this bottle need to undertake? What air pressure must be maintained in an aircraft? Now, after years of schooling and training, building comprehensive and mathematical skills – conduct the experiments, collect the data, apply your formulas, and we've got our magical number in Pascals. If only all types of pressure could be measured with SI units.
How much pressure do unions need to force upon a city to strike a deal? How much peer pressure must a student withstand before falling into drugs or bad decisions? How much pressure do citizens apply upon their government officials before their ideas are pressed through?
Perhaps in this world that is leaning towards reducing that human touch and much needed eye-to-eye communication with increased modernization, technology, and [anti]social networking sites – someday there will be some magical computer algorithm that can "solve" our problems with ease and efficiency by calculating and utilizing just the right amount of pressure.
Really? Holding a city of 2.5 million people hostage for sick days? What about the pressure from threats of nuclear war? Hundreds to thousands of missiles? Or signing one of the thousands of petition letters [warning: opens a file (pro-Taiwan, naturally)] to pressure a government to take action?
Maybe a calculator would solve our problems. But that solution seems to be very much like the "Bigger Pie" theory [yes, first the physics reference, now the bio]. The theory that the solution to our human carrying capacity limits and issues like world hunger will be solved by our increased technology to, i.e. produce more food, thus extending the carrying capacity, thus increasing the threat of problems, i.e. food shortage, which will be appropriately solved by implementing more technology that we would have developed by then. And the cycle goes on and on.
Looking at a list of examples that are running through my mind, as well as decisions in my life, maybe it's a time for a different approach. So many decisions and so many results are… as a result of, a push. And often, it is a negative push – a threat, a fear, an ultimatum.
After all, a force is defined as a push or a pull. Floating in space – a push can have such a dramatic influence on our direction. It can lead us – in any direction in this ever-expanding universe. But there is always a pull – perhaps gravity, or maybe that tugging force on our hearts and our minds, leading us to our goals, too often quieted by the pushes and conflict that surround our lives. In this mess of forces – pushes and pulls – this complex free body diagram, where is our net force pointing to?
But just like the Earth's gravity, once we are headed in the right direction – that pull becomes stronger and stronger, until one day, we fall into our goals, our dreams, to realize… well, I don't know that yet. I guess it is a process of always learning more, and I rather honestly stop before I start making up stuff =D. But I will end off with a two quotes from a book I have been reading recently:
"It is the search that gives meaning to any find" "One often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near." All the Names, José Saramago
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