Kate Loves Math*

I am forever curious on what motivates us. What motivates me and what motivates you. What motivates someone to do something horrific and selfish or what motivates someone to be incredibly altruistic.

One of the first things I do when someone joins a team that I am a part of is to find out what motivates them - towards action, yes, but also what motivates their own joy to rise to their surface; many times those two outcomes are intertwined. I may ask them to choose one characteristic from a well-known resource list of ten values (the Hogan's Leadership Values) because that mix of action and personal joy that seeds their motivation likely tracks back to an individual’s personal value-system. 

These days, I feel like I am a part of a bunch of different groups where our connection is the crux of where our personal values match. These groups want to take action, and I’m thinking the mathematically sound way to do this is to call up our friend Newton, who wrote a pile of text that built upon the work of mathematicians before him - like, Galileo and Kepler. That work is known as Newton’s Laws of Motion (it comes up in my Pendulum essay, too) and it compels me to suggest we use our collective values to seed our motivations because they can be channeled into energy that we all so dearly need to draw upon right now.

Though there are many types of energy, they’re gonna fit into one of two categories: either potential energy, or its partner-in-(hopefully no)crime, kinetic energy. Motivation can take on the form of a dynamic forcing factor, be it a force that prompts an action, or a force that throws up a barricade to block an oncoming other(!) force, or a force that has such power behind it that it changes the very terra firma we’re standing on.

The most beautiful thing about energy is: It never goes away completely.

Sure, it diminishes, it dissipates. Energy can be elusive at times just as much as it can be overwhelming. But one thing it cannot be is...

I really didn’t want to write about loss. Though it is the feeling that’s dominating my thoughts and it seems like everyone (my everyone, at least) is emanating some sort of murky fogginess that is equal parts magnetic and repellant, I’d prefer to not add to what’s inevitably gonna be a pile of quicksand lest I get completely swallowed up by it, too. I need my wits.

Today though I have (finally) found a way to navigate this emotion while simultaneously feeling respect towards others’ individual reactions to those same situations and their choices they make as a result.

Because there’s something very personal about reactions, especially those born of the feelings that run extra deep, you know? The lows as well as the highs. Like, even though each of us may be reacting to the same event or situation where it’s an unsaid agreement that we’re collectively feeling low or collectively feeling high about it, we actually may not be occupying the same exact emotional position at the same time as that event impacts all of us.

I used to believe that we all travel on the same linear emotional path when it comes to reactive emotions; we’re just at different points on that path, at different stages. That’s how it is in the grief process, right? But now I think it’s more like we’re each moving parallel to one another as we experience, react, and make decisions.

I mean, I See You and how you are being over there, but our sinkholes are placed very very differently. How I’m (consciously or not) choosing to drag my feet over them or spring up & over them may also be different than your own movement. We're all existing in the same space and we’re headed in the same direction, it’s just that each of our paths are unique. Though we may all be receiving the same experience, each of our perspectives on that experience is...