DY/DX. 📈

Physical matter, at an atomic scale, is organized—or “stabilized”— energy. So then, somewhere along the genealogy of the universe, energy ebbed and flowed, emerging in one of its transition states as the neural patterns that my consciousness perceives as the conception and transcription of “reality”.

Brain tissue, too, is the product of organized and disorganized matter over time. Is it really so surprising, then, that our minds thematically perceive ups and downs in its projection of reality? There are good days and then there are bad days. There is evil, and there is justice. We can all agree: life is a non-linear phenomenon, teeming with entropy.

What if we graphed the human experience? What if we plotted the trajectory of our cultural and emotional evolution over time? Each derivative, or instantaneous moment in time, would represent a momentarily inconsequential, but cumulatively impactful human interaction within the confines of our universe. Maybe humanity is best visualized as a Möbius loop: an infinity scarf where the net flow inward is equivalent to the net flow outward—a closed system in perfect, paradoxical balance.

I wonder if emotions, like energy, are conserved. Rather than a finite quantity of happiness inequitably dispersed across individuals, we might experience positive and negative integrals that oscillate above and below the x-axis as the entropy of our existence attempts to vibrate back to equilibrium. Youthful energy transitioning into heat, footsteps, and laughter until our proteins degrade or mutate, leading to our inevitable death—or, as my physics professor would put it—succumb to the conservation of mass.