Perpetual Motion Indeed . . .  

Yesterday I brought up an old blog about Becoming and Work In Progress to reread, and, somehow, my own words made me laugh.  At myself, and also at the following  comment from Rudi:

Ethel, I like the way your mind works. This last blog, on Change, is great, and I waited from paragraph to your last line to find the words of Perpetual Motion.

All my life I’ve read that endless search for P. M. and while you described it perfectly, you did not name it. Whether you have not recognized it as such or not, but it is at work from the most microscopic atom, to the most remote ‘planet’ in the far stretches of the universe. Man, animal, whatever, it’s change change change. Nothing destroyed, just changed. Perpetual Motion in action.

Thanks for your weekly words, Ethel. I look forward to where your mind takes you/us each week. I know you know of Perpetual Motion but as long as you didn’t mention the words, I apologize for intruding on your work and put those two words in black and white. Keep the blog going. ~~~~~ Rudi

See,  and thanks to Rudi, right there before me, on my own blog, was at least one  answer to a question I’ve heard debated ever since I learned how to read, and that’s been more than a year or two, and the question was about Perpetual Motion.  Beings in Progress. 

I was a kid when I first saw the question on a Sign Board as Dad was taking the family on a Sunday ride to see the Countryside. And, as an aside, where did the countryside go??? Is it still there under concrete waiting for you to re-discover it? Oh, that’s for another day.

But at one time scientists were constantly seeking to find some machine to produce Perpetual Motion. And over and over would fail. Yet ever so often I’ve read where another is proclaiming they have the answer. No one has, as far as I know. And I laughed over last week’s column (thanks Rudi)  for it was actually about Perpetual Motion, and I hadn’t recognized it. 

Change, is Perpetual Motion. Change, everything is changing, including our bodies and mind, and no matter what we look at or even think of, is changing. And while I’m no ‘brain’, I still have my days and even have a book by Einstein that I get out occasionally to check up on him. He never spoke of God, but did speak and write of some Power that is the basis of all and said it was Energy. Ever-changing, but never disappearing.

And so, I searched his words to find if he spoke more of how Energy is ever changing, but never disappearing, and no doubt he did,  but in words that are beyond my scope. And the thought remained with me, that the only perpetual motion in the world, no matter when, where or how, is Change.

From the most minuscule part of an atom, change. Water, ever changing from steam, cloud, blood, ocean, urine, ice, glacier, to the Soup Pot on my kitchen stove. Water in form after form. Then there’s the earth, rock, sand, animal, leaves, all changing slowly from one form to another. Universe, planet, moons, change . Trees, wild animals, plants, seeds, dry leaves, excrement, the same basic material, but ever different.

I gotta think about this one, and you smart ones who sometimes find my words, think of it also, and tell me, for I’m a  ‘slow learner’.  This world and all that’s in it, is changing. Is it the long sought answer to Perpetual Motion???   So simple, so commonplace???

All we look upon, like it or not, is changing, even as we see it. Our hair, toe nails. People on TV were discussing the earthquakes of a week or so ago, and one stated that the earth, deep down under Nepal had been moving each year, the distance of how much your fingernail grows in the same time. But that small change, eventually builds, until it shifts the weight of the mountain, and we have an earthquake.

You, or me. Those other people. Those people who lived thousands of years ago, and in time became you and me, and those people who will live thousands of years from now and will become so from the changes within us this very moment. We’re part of it.

Change, Perpetual Change. Perpetual Motion. And you can answer back about that bane or blessing of today’s world . . . plastic . . . and in spite of what Thor Heyerdahl, who with companions crossed the Pacific on a raft, told us, that the ocean, once you got 10 or so miles from shore, was so pure.

Then half a century later he and others took the same trip accompanied by scientists, and he wept as he said they never got away from the debris of plastic. All across the Pacific, shore to shore, was our discarded plastic in one form or another. But I again say give it time. Slip forward a few thousands millennia and plastic too will have changed.  Betcha.

Change is Perpetual Motion, we are Beings in Progress, and it is all in force and action right before our own eyes. But it comes so slowly we miss it completely. Give it a thought. And tell me, for Ethel thinks, Ethel wonders, and needs more “Rudi’s” to  help  her along. Ciao.