- Abu Turab Naqvi, Reading Time: 2 Min 37 Sec
While reading a book
on the life of great physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, I
came across one of his sayings about the atoms. It goes like
this......
While reading a book
on the life of great physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, I
came across one of his sayings about the atoms. It goes like
this......“All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world.”
Besides the scientific depth and philosophical meanings this one statement
carries, there is something that got me wonder and re-read the
statement and it goes again....... “attracting each other when they
are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into
one another”. This sentence kept resounding in my mind until I was
able to draw this analogy of human relationships with atoms
attracting and repelling each other.
This tells about the
art of balancing. Atoms attract when they are apart within a limit
and they repel when the limit is crossed. In both the cases, there is
this limit, the threshold distance that help balancing the
conjugation of atoms to form molecules and so on.
This is exactly what
happens when we are about fall in love or already in a relationship.
The attraction comes within the circles of certain distance. We
attract each other, we meet, have coffee or tea, go to movies and
roam around hand in hand. This is perfect until we start feeling that
“squeezed into one another” situation. This is where the problems
begin. This is when the balance breaks.
I have learned from
others and from my own experiences that relationships need some kind
of balance in their pursuit. Both distance and getting closer should
be balanced if we want our relationships to sustain. It is same as
the old dictum of “respecting the personal space”.
But this “respecting
the personal space” kind of confuse some of us and we end up being
too careless while maintaining the “space”. There comes the
atomic theory of relationships.
It tells you that
you should keep up a certain distance that you don't get apart or get
squeezed too much that you had to face repulsion. After all, whatever
we see around us is the clustered manifestation of millions of atoms
guided by the same principle of maintaining the distance. Re-read
that saying of Feynman..
“All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world.”
It says “In that
one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the
world”. This is what compelled me to think this way about the
relationships and draw an analogy with atomic way of attracting and
repelling each other when crossing the threshold of a moderate
distance. This is the atomic theory of relationships.
