August 28, 2019–At the next parade, pay special attention to the flatbeds filled with high-fiving athletes and leaping cheerleaders.
Take note of the pure joy, the enthusiasm, the energy on display. They are punching fists into the sky, jumping up and down, and shaking pompoms. It is wonderful.
As someone with their days a-leaping behind them, I am impressed with these float-loads of pure energy.
I’ve been thinking about energy a lot lately. Where we see it. When we feel it. How we waste it.
Scott Adams, in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, discusses the importance of energy in achieving success. Every choice the syndicated cartoonist makes in his life is focused on maximizing personal energy. He perceives energy as a commodity and arranges his life and habits to create, conserve, and tap into more of it. Adams tracks his diet, workouts, rest, and stress to create the optimum level of energy. That in turn improves both his career and personal life.
As humans, we notice and relate to high-energy people. Think of your favorite politicians, or teachers, or entertainers. I would bet they all exhibit more energy than the also-rans. One example: I watched a video of the Beatles on their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The energy they exude is palpable. Even 55 years later, girls still scream for them.
Trying to cipher the difference between the mind and the brain, I’ve come to think of the brain as the mass and the mind as the energy. The brain (mass) creates the mind (energy). More intriguing, the process is reciprocal. We can use our mind to affect our brain and body.
In the book You Are The Placebo, Joe Dispenza lays out in detail ways to harness the power of the mind to heal the body. In one experiment a group of men in their 70s and 80s were asked to imagine themselves 22 years younger. They were sequestered from current events, and surrounded by icons from that time in their lives, including magazines, music, and movies. In only five days, the changes were documented down to a cellular level. Their posture straightened, their joints became more flexible, and their eyesight and hearing improved. They scored better on mental cognition tests. Some actually gave up their canes.
The author proposes we all are able to experience this, infusing our cells with energy in order to create health and dispel disease. Not to get all new age-y, but thinking of the mind body connection in terms of energy and mass shifts the paradigm. We’ve all known examples where you have set your mind to a goal and you later achieve it, seemingly without conscious thought.
I’ve long said life is an endless fight against entropy. Aging becomes a battle to maintain the energy shown by those young cheerleaders and athletes.
Here is my thought: How would your life change if you looked at it in terms of energy instead of however you are thinking about it now? What if the goal were simply to maximize energy, through thought, nutrition, activities, and rest? How would your daily life be different?
After all, when you think about it, energy is all that keeps us from reverting to a pile of mass.