What Is Potential Energy, Really?

What allows you to make friends and to keep them? Being a social person helps with making friends, surely. As does putting in the effort to be a good friend. But I'm sure we've all had the experience of wanting to become friends with someone, but yet it never really happens. Maybe there's never the time. Maybe you're too far apart, and I mean that literally.

This is something I've observed over time, as friends move around and as people's lives grow, evolve, and change: the total friendship between two people evolves as a function of distance.

This means that two people, given the inclination to become friends, will see their friendship improve and decay based on their physical distance from each other—how far they live from each other. I think this makes intuitive sense. Two people who live together obviously see each other more than two people who live a continent apart. Yet what is surprising is that this function is not linear.

There is a difference between knowing something, and truly understanding it. I think we've all had those moments, the ones where a truth you learned a long time ago really sits with you for the first time. It rests in your mind and stretches out, finally showing off the great expanse of nuance hidden deep within.

Most nights when you happen to spy the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus sitting in a line in the sky, you see them as the dots beside a crescent that they are. Yet sometimes, when framed amid the sunset sky above the wisps of silver cloud, you see them differently. You realize in that moment that you, your great-grandparents, Julius Caesar, and Aristotle all saw this same sky. It has always been for us. We know so much about Jupiter and Venus today, yet no human eye has ever seen more than you're seeing now.

I think we are all, in this time, realizing the true power of words and what they mean, not to those who speak, but to those who listen.

Last year I heard this song from a band called Loser Demon. The song is called Holding Ground and here's the chorus that has been stuck in my soul ever since (added words, mine):

would you believe that this is it and it is good?
doesn't surprise me and i hope that it never would
(I'm) holding ground

I heard that phrase and was immediately repulsed the first time, yet something about it lingered in my heart. I think that reaction is likely the same for lots of people these days. I mean, look at the world? Look at the strife and the trouble and the heartache? How can this be good?

I could do that, I just need more time.

In life we are constantly wishing we had more of something: time, money, friends, energy, etc., and we develop plans to try and meet these goals. We alter our diets, our schedules, we start exercising or reading more. Often times these changes result in significant improvements to our lives. Yet, we never have the energy, the time, or the money that we want. Even when we do succeed in making changes, something else comes up and blocks further progress.

Let's say you want to write a book. You change your schedule to allow for dedicated writing time. However during that time, you're unmotivated. You diet and exercise and read interesting books, trying to kindle the enthusiasm you know you have, but now you have no energy left to write. You have the time, but only to spend staring at a blank page.

Sometimes I can't tell if I'm discovering a cool new hobby, or just getting old. Regardless, today I come to you with a tale of a little endeavor of mine.

In early 2020, a family member took a job far from home and, because of the nature of the work, would therefore be out of cell service for large swaths of time. As a gag, we decided to communicate via long-form letters over email as well as the occasional postcard. Later that year, in the grips of a pandemic, my D&D group went virtual, but that came with several drawbacks—including the sudden lack of the ability to pawn chewing gum off of me during games.¹ So, before our first virtual game, I mailed every one a pack of gum, to be opened on the call.

It was fun, a cheap little laugh. However in the time since, my occasional appreciation for the mail has become nothing short of a deep and profound predilection.