A Superfluid New Year, Reprise
Last New Year’s Day I wrote a heartfelt blog post exploring a poetic interconnection among Taoism, physics, and the turning of the year. Today I feel inspired to reprise that essay, slightly revised, for those of you who’ve joined me in 2009… This one’s for you!
I love Chinese philosophy—its naturalness, its easy wisdom.
I’m in good company: Taoism may be the most popularized religious mysticism in the world. Books about any variety of topics have the phrase “The Tao of…” in their titles. A quick search at Amazon yields The Tao of Healing, The Tao of Eating, The Tao of Photography, and even The Tao of Network Security Monitoring! And in contemporary America, the Chinese words yin and yang have become cultural fall-back terms for the idea of interdependent opposites. They’re part of the pop lexicon.
A key Taoist concept that’s less widely known is wu wei. This Chinese term is perhaps best translated as “effortless doing”. The paradoxical phrase describes an orientation of self-surrender to the tao—the all-encompassing Way of the natural universe. Essentially, wu wei is pure acceptance of the process of life and the sacred rightness of every moment. It’s about moving in the world by flowing with it.
Religious scholar Huston Smith, in his seminal book The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, summarizes the idea this way:
Action in the mode of wu wei is action in which friction—in interpersonal relationships, in intra-psychic conflict, and in relation to nature—is reduced to a minimum.
In physics, a superfluid is a phase of matter in which viscosity is zero. Viscosity is a term that describes a liquid’s resistance to flow, or disturbance by other substances. A thin liquid like water has low viscosity: it flows quick and easy and other substances move through it without much bother, their speed only slightly effected. A thick liquid like honey has high viscosity: it flows slow and sluggish and other substances struggle to move through it, becoming seriously held up as they try.
Viscosity, then, is a measure of a liquid’s friction.
In a superfluid, there’s basically no friction at all. This means a superfluid flows infinitely smooth, and things move within it resistance-free. So anything in motion inside a superfluid stays in motion, theoretically, forever. With no friction to slow or stop it, a process inside a superfluid unfolds unendingly!
A superfluid strikes me as an interesting analogy for the tao. And the quality of superfluidity is such a cool metaphor for wu wei.
So… Today commences a new calendar year: it’s 2010! This blog post is a benediction: May we all have a superfluid new year, characterized by the utmost wu wei—with friction within and among us reduced to a minimum, our lives flowing infinitely smooth, and our happinesses unending.
Thank you for your readership! Love and blessings to you.
Adam,
I very much enjoyed reading this today – thank you for sharing! I hope to catch you tonight at Room 5 – if I don’t make it, have a wonderful show. I know you will. I hope your 2010 is a marvel and that many years of terrificness follow!!
xoxo
Reply to comment
poeticinterconnections Reply:
January 3rd, 2010 at 12:57 pm
You’re so welcome, Carrie! Wishing you all the best in 2010, and beyond, as well…
Reply to comment
thanks for reposting this adam! i went back and read the comments i left from the first one ( a year ago now!) and couldn’t believe how fast the time has gone since that post. in reflecting on your words, and how our perception of time is at once carving our lives up into these bits of minutes, hours and days and how now, looking back to a year ago, it feels like it could have been just yesterday or earlier today that it was written. from a superfluidity standpoint, all the “time” that has passed and all the “friction” which was experienced over the course of this past year (not only for myself, but obviously on a world wide scale as well), as we look back, the friction is gone. the experiences were had and yet have folded back into the mind. so whatever happened, happened, but one ends up in the present moment again which becomes superfluid as we look back on it in the past. because whatever friction we may be experiencing in the present moment loses its grip as it passes into the next. the tricky part is seeing that one’s perception of friction is totally short lived and transitory, existing only for a particular moment in time. i find myself getting hung up sometimes in the “friction” of any given moment and then projecting it out into some unknown possible future in my mind when in fact, none of those futures ever play themselves out into fruition in quite the way i may be imagining. the moment passes. something else happens and life takes me on a new tangent. i’m beginning to think life always is, and always has been a superfluid state. we’ve just talked ourselves into it being otherwise. thanks again for sharing your thoughts adam, and for helping me to do some thinking again too.
Reply to comment
poeticinterconnections Reply:
January 3rd, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Thank you for your thoughtful comment… Now you have me thinking! I burn a lot of energy projecting futures that never unfold predictably. It’s great for creativity, writing, etc. but stressful for living. Einstein called time a “persistent illusion”. This year I intend to practice mindfulness of the superfluid present. Starting… NOW.
Reply to comment