210429 What I learned in my studies this morning

2 AM thunderstorms 

Child hides under our covers

Many May flowers

From The Daily Stoic: 

It's all too easy for me to become stuck on small and petty concerns, focused on unimportant, mundane things. 

That's one of the reasons I am studying Zen, Buddhism, and the sutras: to broaden my perspective and gain a better appreciation of connections to things larger than myself. 

Thunderstorms are bigger than I am. 

Today's Meditation:

Like finding my way through a dense fog, or a heavy rain, what I seek is already here, I am just not able to see it. 

From Six Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman:

Chapter 4: Conservation of Energy 

What is energy?

Feynman offers a wonderful analogy to explain conservation of energy: a boy has 28 blocks and, no matter what he does with the blocks, they always remain exactly the same in both number and quality. They always remain identical to their original set. (The original is so much better than my summary. It's long and informative and funny. Go. Read. Learn.) 

He states that this has always been the case in every example seen to date and, so far as we can tell, is a universal law. Sort of like how, if a bishop begins on a white square in chess, no matter what moves it makes during the game, if it's still on the board, we will always find it on a white square. 

Energy, he notes, is a mathematical idea, abstract in nature. Because of this, we can prove it must be conserved, but we cannot actually say what it is. 

If only he'd have used 42....