So Physics Wasn't Useless

Turns out physics wasn’t useless. What a seesaw can teach you about effort, balance, and why doing less was never the point. This episode is about leverage and learning how to carry your life differently.

Transcript

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I'm Ashley and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth, not wounds, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

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I've been spending a lot of time at the park recently. I've actually developed a few favorite parks across my city. But I have one in particular that I really like near my home. And there's a seesaw that looks like a dragonfly, and it's so cute. And I always get on the seesaw with my daughter because it's one of her favorite attractions, I guess I'll call it, at the park. And whenever I get on the seesaw, obviously she and I are not the same size, weight, any of the things. So I'm doing a particular type of work when I'm sitting on the seesaw with her. And it's not strenuous work, but it is work to redistribute my weight in a way that creates specifically engineers an experience for her. In this case, joy, right? So I'm doing a calculation in my head and in my body weight to get to this ideal place where it becomes her favorite attraction. And so recently I was sitting on this dragonfly seesaw that is, again, so cute, and my mind just started going from one place to the next place to the next place, and I landed at what today's episode is actually about. But I do just quickly want to have you follow that train of thought of how I ended up thinking about my ninth grade physics class because I was sitting on the seesaw and I thought to myself, work smarter, not harder. Don't know why my mind went there, but I thought, work smarter, not harder, which I think has a bad rap, but I'll come back to that. So okay. I'm thinking about that concept, and then I start thinking about balance, balancing, work-life balance, right? Here I am on this seesaw with my daughter, taking time out of my day, out of my week, when I have other responsibilities, other things to do. But this is a part of the balance in my life in its own way. So I started thinking about balance, working smart, working harder, and my mind went to scales, justice scales, you know, like two trays that are kind of on a holder. I'm describing this terribly, but you understand. And so now my mind is on this train and I'm thinking about this imagery of scales. So I'm sitting at the park playing on the seesaw, obviously repositioning my weight to engineer this outcome of my daughter saying we. And this brings me to my ninth grade physics class, and then it brings me to the image of the justice scale. And then I realized that if I inverted the image of that justice scale or that scale, I'd kind of get what looks like a seesaw. And then I started thinking about the seesaw as a symbol of a balanced life rather than this scale. And I think that's what clicked for me in that moment because being on that seesaw made me realize that my relationship to work smarter, not harder, was off. But not in the way people usually say. I wasn't thinking about it as like cutting corners or doing less, I was thinking about it as a trade-off. Effort versus outcome. Like if I could just get more with less, that was the goal. But what I was actually doing on that seesaw wasn't reducing effort, I was repositioning it, and somehow that completely changed the result. And so then I thought about that at large. So let's back up. So I said that I think that work smarter, not harder has a bad reputation, and I do because people hear that and often assume it means doing less, finding some kind of loophole, or that you're getting ahead because someone else is picking up the slack. And I don't think that's what it means at all. I don't think it has anything to do with doing less work as a member of the collective. I do think it has everything to do with how the work is being done. And I think that's where I was off. Thinking about it as a trade-off, effort versus outcome. Like if I could just get the same result with less effort, that would be smarter. But that's not actually what's happening. Like, even something as simple as my daughter's hair. And I use this example in a recent entry. I believe I've talked about how people ask me how I manage to do her hair every day, which, okay, and part of my system for that is doing half of it at night. I talked about that. So now, in the context of work smarter, not harder, someone might look at that and think, that's not working smarter. That's actually working harder. What could be one session in the morning has now turned into two sessions. But what I already knew instinctively before I had this dragonfly seesaw revelation is that I understood that I wasn't trying to cut down the amount of work. I was trying to shift the weight of the amount of work so that it could be carried, one, more joyfully, and two, more realistically, and the overall balance, quote unquote, of my day, of my life, and just the other things that I have to do. So the total effort didn't change. I just moved it, and the experience of it changed. And so this is where I think we get confused, myself included. We assume that the smart way, quote unquote, has to be the way that requires less effort. When really the smart way, quote unquote, is just the way that distributes the same effort in a way that actually works. So before we go any further, where it starts to get a little confusing is when we use the word balance. We all say it, I just need more balance, work-life balance, I'm trying to balance everything. But if you actually stop and picture what that means, most people are thinking about those old school lever scales, like I said, where you put something on one side and something on the other, and the goal is for them to weigh the same. Equal weight, even distribution, everything leveled out. That's the image, and it feels right because it's clean and it's simple. It suggests that if you just get the proportions correct, everything will settle. But life doesn't actually work like that because the things you're trying to quote unquote balance aren't equal units. They don't show up in the same way every day. They don't require the same kind of energy, they even hold the same meaning from person to person. Like even something as simple as yard work for one person, that's pleasure. They enjoy it, it's relaxing, it's something they choose to do. For someone else, it's a responsibility, it's a chore, it's a maintenance, it's something that has to get done. Same activity, completely different weight. So now you don't just have uneven weight, you have weight that isn't even defined in the same way. So if that's not the right image, if it's not a scale, if it's not equal weight on both sides, then what are we actually working with? Because here's the thing a scale and a seesaw aren't actually that different. They're both systems that respond to weight on two sides. They both have a center point, they both shift based on distribution, in a lot of ways, they're the same idea. So it would make sense that my mind went from one to the other. But they're trying to do two very different things. And this is why the distinction felt important to me because a scale is trying to prove that two things are equal. A seesaw is trying to work even when they're not. So if you weren't paying attention during this part of physics class, I got you. We're gonna walk through it together. So let's go back to the image of the seesaw at the two sides, responsibility on one end, leisure on the other end, these two beautiful children, and the thing that they're both sitting on, that board, that's your day. That represents your day, that represents your life. Right? Now in physics, that board has a name. It's called a lever. That's the thing that holds the weight, the structure that everything is sitting on. And by itself, it doesn't do much, it just exists until you introduce the most important part: the fulcrum. That point underneath the board where everything pivots. That's the thing that determines how the weight is experienced, not how much weight there is, not who's sitting on either side of the board, but where that fulcrum point is placed. And this is the part that matters. Because once you have a lever and you have a fulcrum, you get leverage, which is just a fancy way of saying the same weight can feel completely different depending on how it's positioned. So let's bring that back to real life. You got your day, that's the board, you've got your responsibilities, you've got leisure, that's the weight. None of that goes away, none of that gets lighter on its own, but what you can change is where the fulcrum sits. And in life, that looks like a decision, a structural choice, something as simple as I want my mornings to feel slower. I want my mornings to feel like leisure. Okay. So instead of trying to split your entire day evenly, you move the weight. You take some of that responsibility and you push it into the evening. You batch it, you group it, you give it a place to live that doesn't compete with your morning. Now nothing disappeared. The responsibilities are still there, the time is still the same, but because you changed where things sit, the entire experience shifts. Your morning actually feels like leisure, your responsibilities still get handled, and the tension between the two drops. That's not less work, that's not cutting corners, that's you using the system correctly. That's you taking the same life and placing it in a way that actually works. And this is the part that I think is actually the coolest thing about the fulcrum because the whole point of a fulcrum is not to remove the weight, it's not to make the weight equal, it's that you can take the same weight and by moving one point completely change how it feels to carry it. That's the trick, that's the smart part. So when I reframe this for the sovereign person, the goal is to replace the image of the justice scale as the end goal for achieving life balance with the image of the playground Seesaw. Because when a sovereign person envisions balance, they're not asking, How do I make this equal? They're asking, where can I reposition this weight so carrying it feels different? Because that's what the fulcrum does. It doesn't take anything away, it doesn't reduce anything, it just changes the point of contact, and suddenly what felt heavy doesn't feel the same anymore. Not because it changed, but because you moved, and that's the lens. The sovereign lens is trained to see the fulcrum, to see that there is always a point in the system where one shift changes everything else. So to close this out, I actually want you to try something because this only works if you can see it in your own life, right? So I want you to think about your day, and I want you to identify one thing, your least favorite task, something that sits in your day and just feels heavy, something you avoid, something you can't remove, but you also just may not have the resources right now to delegate it away, you know what I mean? It's not going anywhere. So instead of asking, how do I get rid of this? I want you to ask a different question. Where is this sitting in my day right now? When does it show up? What is it competing with? How is that placement affecting everything around it? Because that's the part that I don't think we're considering. I think we try to to jump straight to removing the weight instead of looking at where the weight is placed. So now I want you to play with that a bit. So you identified your least favorite task and you've thought about where it sits in your day, that thing that you really don't like, you do it around 4.15 every day. Okay. What would it look like to move it? Not eliminate it, not reduce it, just reposition it. Could it happen at a different time of day? Could it be broken up into smaller pieces? Could it live in a space where it's not competing with other things? Because that's all I was doing with my daughter's hair. I wasn't removing the task, I wasn't reducing the amount of work that it took. If anything, on paper, it looks like more work. I took one session and turned it into two. But what I was really doing was shifting the weight of that task so that it could be carried more joyfully and more realistically. And that one shift changed the entire experience for me and for her. So this isn't about capacity, it's not about doing more, it's not about doing less, it's about placement, it's about recognizing that the thing you're trying to get rid of might not need to go anywhere at all, it might just need to sit somewhere else. So, I'll leave you with this. Can you identify at least one fulcrum point in your life right now? One thing that, if you moved it, would change how everything else feels to carry. Let me know.