Let Your Mind Dance

TA faculty have been spending much of our meeting time this past week familiarizing ourselves - and making the transition to - remote learning. It's been challenging for all of us - faculty, staff, and of course you the students.  As I've thought about the learning proficiency on Reflection, I've found my own self reflecting on the phrase "let your mind dance", some words that came to mind while doing some mindfulness meditation earlier this year. This morning, as I was doing my usual moment of zen ;) I came across an article about President Obama's Secretary Of Energy, Steven Chu that starts with a great example of this:

"In the winter of 1984, a young scientist named Steven Chu was working as the new head of the quantum electronics division at AT&T's Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. For months, he'd been struggling to find ways to trap atoms with light so that he could hold them in place and study them better. It was an idea he'd picked up from an older colleague, Arthur Ashkin, who had wrangled with the problem all through the 1970s before finally being told to shut the project down--which he did, until Chu came along. ("I was this new, young person who he could corrupt," Chu later joked.) Now Chu, too, had hit an impasse until, one night, a fierce snowstorm swirled through New Jersey. Everyone at Bell had left early except for Chu, who lived nearby and decided to stay a bit longer. As he watched the snow drift outside, he realized they'd been approaching the problem incorrectly: He first needed to cool the atoms, so that they were moving only as fast as ants, rather than fighter jets; only then could he predict their movements and trap them with lasers. It was a key insight, and Chu's subsequent work on cooling atoms eventually earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in physics. While it may sound inevitable in retrospect, big breakthroughs like that don't come along too often."

This anecdote captures perfectly the idea of letting your mind dance. Sometimes we face problems, assignments, situations, or remote learning not knowing how to start. Whether its a paper or a painting, what is the first word or brushstroke to put on the paper or canvass. This anecdote emphasizes the importance of non-active thinking. Letting the mind wander. Looking out the window. Giving yourself the opportunity to relax enough to allow your mind to forge some natural connection between what you already know and what it is you are trying to grasp - that elusive idea that lies just beyond your reach. 

I emphasized the final sentence in the New Republic piece, because it too raises an important aspect of letting your mind dance. Very often the outcome - that big breakthrough - seems inevitable when it becomes explicit. I'm sure that every Chem 1 student would know that atomic motion slows down as temperature decreases. But it took a moment of wonder (yes, and a pretty smart guy) to experience the epiphany that this simple fact could be applied in an entirely new way in order to achieve an elusive research goal.

Let your mind dance on this thought for the semester: Current studies indicate that the Silverback Gorilla will be extinct in 30-50 years. At the same time a minute, non-living string of atoms, the COVID virus, is creating havoc around the world. In the novel Ishmael, the title character is one of the few surviving gorillas held in lab captivity who takes on a human as his student. (He communicates telepathically. It's a novel!) The book concludes with Ishmael sharing this fine thought:  “With the Gorilla gone, will there be hope for man”? Reflect on this statement. Dance around some of the information you gleaned from reading The Sixth Extinction Chap 5 and 6 and share your thoughts.

We'll re-convene on Monday with a more formal assignment starting our unit on water quality. But for now I'd like to give you this assignment for the weekend: It's going to be a sunny, though somewhat cool, weekend. Go outside. Observe the world around you. Perhaps, take a hike (as I'm planning on doing for Saturday) and most importantly, let your mind dance. Think about the beauty around us, the role you have in our TA community, all the support within that community that is available to you, and the fact that we are all in this together. And yes - write a response to the post that documents your thoughts to all these issues including the large central question posed by Ishmael: How to find hope for mankind in these challenging times. Keep it positive and hopeful. I took the picture that accompanies this post on Thursday in front of Mrs. Gerhardt's room. The campus was pretty quiet, and yes there was that frosty snow on the ground, but those crocuses (croci?) brought a big smile to my face. Let your mind dance.

Be well - take care - and keep smiling!