Making your own path

This Wednesday I tried a unique activity called free running. This is an urban variant of the art known as parkour; made popular by the movie Jump London. This activity is very popular in Europe where groups of runners occasionally invade busy urban environments and fly through obstacles with apparent effortlessness. It’s quite exciting to watch.

Free runners practice religiously because of the extreme physical strength required for the activity. They usually start with stretching and soon move on to practicing jumps, leaps, wall hangs, and falling, which usually ends with a ground roll.

They use these skills to virtually eliminate all obstacles in their way learning how to use their body and surroundings to effortlessly, quickly, and beautifully glide through their environment.

The event I participated in was sponsored by K Swiss and their new free running shoe. They had set up an entire training course with walls to climb, rails to jump, and mats to practice rolling. I joined a little late because I had class, so I didn’t get a chance to warm up and stretch, consequently twisting my ankle on the first jump. It didn’t hurt to bad so I continued on. After we practiced the jumps and rolls we moved on to the wall hang where we would have to run, jump up and hang on from the top of a wall in order to climb over it. They taught us several basic techniques, which if practiced could turn me into a hardcore parkour dude.

I had a blast doing this although my ankle does hurt quite a bit now. Once I’m healed I am sure I’ll try this again. I like the ideology behind free running. The feeling of freedom you get from the total elimination of your environment is exhilarating. Knowing that no matter what stands in your way you can go over, under, or through it is truly liberating.

Theory number one: on stuff bigger than us

We as humans have always had this unexplainable desire to comprehend things bigger than us like the universe and beyond. This is a perspective that is unique to our species. We also seem to be interested in stuff much smaller than us such as molecules, atoms, and DNA. It seems that we know more about the latter.

As far as things much bigger than us, we have a lot of theories but not too many concretes. I think this is due to our brain’s limited capacity.

Anyway, I’m babbling.

I have a new theory that could help explain many laws that I would consider to be laws of physics but some may disagree. It may explain chance, probability, and cycles as they relate to planetary, galactic, and atomic systems.

So here it is.

We know that just about anything in the universe is constantly moving.

Electrons spin around the nucleus, the planet goes around the star, the star rotates around a black hole, and so on. This cyclic pattern, if graphed would create a sine wave.

Have you ever taken a pattern, maybe a grid on a transparency, and overlay this pattern with another? It creates an entirely different pattern, an optical illusion at the points where they intersect. Now if you take the top pattern and rotate it the underlying pattern will appear to change as different points are now intersecting. So now we’ve taken two simple patterns and created a third through synergy.

The same thing could be observed in music. When you overlay two sounds and if certain points match up, you get harmony. When they don’t match we call it discord.

Back to the cycles.

Those waves that I discussed earlier are everywhere and have an infinite range of scales. But they combine to create harmony in the cosmos. When these waves are matched up just right certain events may occur such as good days, bad days, natural disasters, new species are created, species are wiped out, you win the lottery, you lose your wallet, etc. Or even bigger cosmic changes that have nothing to do with mankind such as statistical probability and the law of large numbers.

In essence I’m saying that everything in the universe is made of music including ourselves, and the harmony/discord created in this complex system explains why I win one out of every eight poker games I play.

It’s a little far out, abstract, and ill-defined, but I really think we need a unified theory of the laws of chance and physics and this is my attempt at that.