Me, a Molecule

Time for a little science talk. Don't worry, this is actually pretty exciting stuff.

Yo, that title would be a great song title, too. I'm feeling inspired like no other this morning! 

Proving that I am indeed a normal person who happens upon ideas is normal person ways (I'm really not all that enlightened), I was in the shower today when my thoughts went on one of those wild rabbit trails that ends up with me being like, “oh wow I should write that down”! But then I never do.

Until today.

Basically, I was thinking about how in yoga class, the instructors say to breathe in “positive energy” and breathe out the positive and negatives. Me with my science brain took it to extremes in terms of thinking of it literally. Imagine me standing in the shower (actually, don't. That's weird.), and I’m talking to myself in my head like, “yeah! Breathe in those positive ions - come on in hydrogen! Chloride? Get outta here!” my O chem lab instructors would be horrified to hear this, but I'm pretty sure I was a major disappointment to them anyways.

I took a lot of chemistry classes to get my degree, and I disliked none of them quite the way I disliked organic chemistry, but apparently cool ideas like this can come from even the most unlikeable things. All that thought about ions and positive and negative charges got me from thinking about inhaling potentially hazardous gases to what those charges mean scientifically  for the molecules, but how it was also a killer metaphor for the ups and downs we experience in life.

Molecules are made of atoms. Atoms have things called electrons. Having certain amounts of electrons make a molecule negative or positively charged. Sometimes, losing an electron makes a molecule positively charged, which means it can go bond with other molecules that are negatively charged, create a new compound, and do something cool like become liquid water instead of a couple gas molecules floating around in the air.

Gaining an electron has the same effect.

Sometimes, it takes loss in life to be set in the direction you're supposed to be going. And there are a lot of directions to be going in. Your loss could lead you to new opportunities, new people, and beautiful experiences you wouldn't have had without it. I think about my past and how none of the awesome things that have happened to me lately most likely wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had those awful experiences.

Studying science, for me, reinforced my belief in God. Seeing the patterns and tiny details against a bigger picture and physical results of things constantly happening in nature, in our bodies, in space, in everything is pretty amazing. I know many people would disagree, but that is what I've come to see, and I certainly believe it points to something much larger than humans.

I can't explain or justify the whole “everything happens for a reason” because I really don't like that phrase, but I believe that how we react to what happens to us is more important than understanding why it happened anyways. Molecules don't think about that lost electron - they literally change into something new and continue on.