J: JOULE

The Joule is the standard unit of energy--or work--in the International System. It represents the amount of energy expressed as the work done when a force of one newton acts through a distance of one meter. The name comes from the 19th century British physicist (and brewer), James Prescott Joule, who demonstrated his absolute fascination with physics when he said, “It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.” This simple unit points to an amazing concept: the seemingly interchangeable nature of the words “energy” and “work”. Again, the joule is a unit of work OR energy! In physical terms, there is no work without energy. Where along the way, then, did the pedestrian sense of the word “work” become so negative? How did we grow so jaded? While the pop culture throws around the word “energy” more than ever before, using it in very personal ways to describe positive forces that exude from a person’s very essence, on the flip side, even with historic unemployment rates, the word “work” immediately summons an image of drudgery! How did we get here? Work was never meant to be disconnected from energy. Work is just energy expressed. When we are doing something we love—something that easily brings us to flow state—that is an easy one. But when our doing has come unhooked from our passion—or never quite flowed from there to begin with—that’s when the trouble comes. Rather than seeing work as energy moving through time and space, we feel as if it is pushing us into an energy debt state—demanding energy we don’t even have. The Greeks weren’t there. The Greek used to write the New Testament uses the word energeia, which is the root of our word energy to denote “power in motion” or “working” when the source is divine. But even the Greek word use for man’s “work,” ergon, means an action that carries out an inner desire, intention or purpose. Clearly, in the language of Greek, the work was meant to come from the heart or spirit. And the Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, before the Bible writers, had honed out concepts of energeia that were clearly celebrations of empowered motion. Chariots of Fire the movie splashed across the big screen during my college days—when I was hot in pursuit of my destiny in science, busy traversing the path between energy and work! The iconic movie telling the story of two members of the 1924 Olympic track team from the United Kingdom, was all about the comparison between them: Harold Abrahams, the driven loner with something to prove, versus Eric Liddle, who described his running in terms of his relationship with God: “When I run I feel His pleasure.” (So often, Christians so obviously feel they have something to prove, but this is not what Eric Liddle seemed to demonstrate. He also said, “I believe God made me for a purpose…but He also made me fast!) To Eric Liddle, running was not the kind of “work” we complain about today: it was the ancient sense of movement of divine energy completing some kind of inner desire planted inside of him, gloriously manifesting as MOTION! The freedom that Eric Liddle knew in running did not extend to his interpretation of the Ten Commandments. The crisis of the movie comes when Eric arrives at the Paris Olympics only to discover that his race is on a Sunday. He holds a conviction that the Sabbath is a day of rest and declares to an angry British Olympic Committee that he must withdraw from the race. The day is saved only when Lord Lindsey offers to give up his second race to Eric, “just to see you run”. One wise member of the Olympic committee has noticed that Eric Liddle runs in a different way than the others—from within. He says, when reminiscing over the Olympic Committees powerless position in the face of Liddle’s inner principles, that there is no cause that would be worth severing the man’s running from his heart, as forcing him to run on the Sabbath would have done. He knew where Liddle’s energy came from and he knew the work could not go on without it. It is the “committees” of our lives--the dream-stealers and heart-connection-“severers”--that try to force us deeper into our modern cynical definition of WORK. When severed from the inner energy it was meant to flow from, work ultimately grinds to a halt. We must be creative enough to rethink our races. Sometimes an alternate circumstance is called for, but always an alternate mindset is available—one that rediscovers the JOULES necessary to return to the state of empowerment! We probably do not need to reschedule our races like Eric Liddle did. We probably just need to remember why we started running in the first place. We may have been so busy taking care of the details of the competition that we forgot the purpose. I took on this A to Z blogging challenge with purpose. For the first week, I couldn’t wait to wake up and see what happened as I tried to flesh out my single word beginnings into blog entries. It was exhilarating and I felt (as probably many of my fellow bloggers did) a tinge of empowering apprehension about whether or not I could hold myself to the task! Now we are approaching the halfway mark and I have been tempted to shift from the Greek concept of empowered work back to the seemingly American one of work quite separate from energy. My thoughts have been ever so slowly shifting from, “I can’t wait to write,” to “Oh, I have to write.” But, there is a priming of the pump effect. When I sit down to actually DO the work, I notice I am tapping into an energy reserve! To use one of my favorite phrases, which combines concepts from Steve Jobs, quantum physics, and something Bono heard from Desmond Tutu, I am “participating in realities that are seeking to emerge.” I discover the ENERGY associated with the WORK (and necessary for the work) when I sit down to actually DO the work! The take-home message is this: Energy and work were never meant to be separated. That view is an artifact of perception—a result of some misguided conclusion formed in disappointment. This amazing universe by design energizes activities that align with purpose. Heart and hand were meant to be one movement.