Stars & RomComs

I grade for an astronomy class this semester, so I get to relearn a lot of things from when I took the course. Stars are believed to have formed out of clouds of hydrogen, helium, and random dust in space. The bigger the cloud, the bigger the star that forms from it, because there is more stuff to be pulled into the star and more gravitational energy to do the pulling. Bigger stars pull together with more gravitational energy, and they have hotter cores (gravitational energy becomes thermal energy). The stars also create new elements in their cores. Remember how elements are made of different numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons? When hydrogen and helium heat up, they fly around and smash together into bigger groups. That makes new elements. The greater heat essentially makes the star "burn up" faster than smaller stars, but it can create bigger elements before it dies. Thus, bigger stars have shorter lives, and smaller stars have longer lives. It seems backwards, because more wood for a fire means it'll burn longer, right? Not if it's in one gigantic pile. Smaller stars don't burn as hotly, but they don't cool as quickly.

RomComs generally have two story lines:

1. Boy & Girl meet. Instantly fall in love. Someone does something stupid, and they break up. Everyone is sad, but eventually the stupid person does some sort of huge romantic gesture to show just how sorry s/he is (like chasing to an airport, building a white house with blue shutters...). The first person ultimately forgets the offense, and they live happily ever after.

2. Boy and Girl are either friends or hate each other. Either way, they are constantly in each others' lives as one or both of them do stupid things with other people. In a moment of weakness (a bar, recovering from a break-up...), they get together. Sometimes there's an "oh-no-we-didn't" moment that's eventually overpowered, but they're just magnets that stick together. They forget why they didn't date or hated each other. They live happily ever after.

The problem with these isn't just that they're unrealistic. It's not just that they oversimplify relationships; it's that when one out of two marriages end in divorce, that is all people know about relationships. This isn't just a post about intense relationships that fizzle or friendships that last forever. I'm wondering if it's even possible for intense relationships to last.

Can you have a big star that has a long life?

Technically all stars have long lives, like a bajillion years or something (I just made that up), but I have to wonder. RomComs would say that when you end up together, every moment will be intense. It'll be a giant star that burns hotter and brighter than others. But physics says the bigger, brighter, and hotter the star, the quicker it will die.

What if strong, healthy relationships are like smaller stars? They still create new elements in their cores, they still emit light, and their deaths are still noteworthy galactic events. But maybe, just maybe, healthy relationships aren't about being big and flawless. They just are. And instead of giving up on them, like RomComs tell us to do unless both people sweep their problems under the rug, maybe we need the other person to tell us we're acting like a crazy person. What if we could let that person create new things in us, make us better, teach us about ourselves, as long as that person is in our life?

Life: Textbooks, Labs, and Picasso

Last semester, I took my one lab science course, Astronomy, as a part of my core requirements. It was a great example of different types of learning, because in lab courses you learn and experience. The best labs were ones where we used a spectrometer to see the different properties of light or where we lined up lenses and saw how they flipped a poster at the end of the hall upside-down. The good labs weren't just worksheets with specific numbers; that's classroom, textbook stuff.

If your mind is as crazy as mine can be, you've already reached a moral: life is about living, not formulas, calculations, and textbooks. It's not about playing it safe and coloring inside the lines. But that's not the only thing I'm thinking about.

Go back to the learning analogy. Remember that there are different styles of learning. Some people learn best when they read off the page; they remember where the text was relative to other information and pictures, the re-read the words until they fall neatly into organized memories and can be recalled as needed. Other people have to speak or teach what they are trying to learn to etch it into the sands of their recollection. They need to look at the keyboard as they type so they can close their eyes and recall where the keys were. Still other people need to know why; they need to understand what works and what doesn't work about everything relating to that fact or theory. They need to experience it.

Now consider how people live their lives. Some people read historical, philosophical, or even religious texts and grasp a great deal from the text. They can apply the meaning to their lives, and they truly internalize the concepts. Others need to process their understandings by talking to other people. They have an "open mind" and are truly touched by the experiences of others. They change when they see something happening. And still other people learn what the painting of their life will look like as they simply color and find out what looks good. It's not that they do not understand that which motivates the first person. It's not that they do not wish they could be completely motivated and changed by the stories of others, after all it would be nice to learn from another person's mistakes. What if it was that this type of person simply learned differently?

What if, instead of condemning others who do not condemn themselves, we allowed them to go "Picasso" on their life's beautiful canvas until it became uniquely beautiful?